Specimen Song - (Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré) by Peter Bowen (Paperback)

About the Book

A serial killer follows Du Pre from Washington, DC, back to Montana
A lost and frightened horse plods down the National Mall, startling the crowd. When Gabriel Du Pre spots the confused animal, the connection is immediate, for neither of these creatures belongs in the sweltering heat of a DC summer. Du Pre, a Metis Indian from the wilds of Montana, calms the horse and leads it to the nearest policeman. Du Pre is in Washington to play his people's music for a Smithsonian festival, but after leading the horse to safety, he encounters a murder instead.
The dead woman is Cree Indian, come down from Canada to sing in the festival. Du Pre tries to put her death out of his mind and returns to Montana, but more killings follow: each time with a primitive weapon, each time foretold by a local shaman. As the body count rises and the killer closes on Du Pre, the lawman vows to never again make the mistake of leaving Montana.

Book Synopsis

A "plain-spoken, deep-thinking Montana cattle inspector" takes on a serial killer in DC (The New York Times Book Review).

With misgivings, cattle inspector and sometime deputy Gabriel Du Pré has left his hometown of Toussaint, Montana, for big-city Washington, DC, where the Métis Indian fiddler has agreed to play his people's music for a Smithsonian festival. But like the frightened and confused horse galloping wildly down the National Mall, Du Pré is very much out of his element. He does know how to catch and calm a runaway horse, however.

If only catching a killer could be so simple. When a Cree woman from Canada who came to sing in the festival is found murdered, her death is just the first in a series of fatal attacks on Native Americans. Each killing is foretold by a shaman, and each time a primitive weapon is used. As the body count rises, Du Pré fears he might be the serial killer's ultimate target.

New York Times-bestselling author Ridley Pearson says about Peter Bowen's Montana mysteries: "The best of Tony Hillerman meets Zane Grey . . . Du Pré is a character of legendary proportions." And Booklist calls Gabriel Du Pré "one of the most unusual characters working the fictional homicide beat."

Specimen Song is the 2nd book in The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Review Quotes

"Bowen's prose is often droll and his characters well-etched." --Publishers Weekly "One of the most unusual characters working the fictional homicide beat . . . powerfully poetic but unsentimental." --Booklist "The best of Tony Hillerman meets Zane Grey . . . Du Pré is a character of legendary proportions." --Ridley Pearson, author of The Angel Maker and No Witness

About the Author

Peter Bowen (b. 1945) is best known for his mystery novels set in the modern American West. When he was ten, Bowen's family moved to Bozeman, Montana, where a paper route introduced him to the grizzled old cowboys who frequented a bar called The Oaks. Listening to their stories, some of which stretched back to the 1870s, Bowen found inspiration for his later fiction.

Following time at the University of Michigan and the University of Montana, he published his first novel, Yellowstone Kelly, in 1987. After two more novels featuring the real-life western hero, Bowen published Coyote Wind (1994), which introduced Gabriel Du Pré, a mixed-race lawman living in fictional Toussaint, Montana. He has written fifteen novels in the series, in which Du Pré gets tangled up in everything from cold-blooded murder to the hunt for rare fossils. Bowen continues to live and write in Livingston, Montana.