Nails: (13 Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré)

"Fiddler, father, widower, cowboy and lover, Du Pré has the soul of a poet, the eyes of a wise man, and the heart of a comic" (The New York Times Book Review). Gabriel Du Pré's precocious granddaughter, Pallas, has returned from her Washington, DC, boarding school, and trouble seems to have come along for the ride. Du Pré's girlfriend's son, Chappie, is also back from serving in Iraq, minus one leg and one eye. As the family tries to help him adjust to civilian life, the town is invaded by a fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist sect, whose preacher is hell-bent on imposing his own beliefs on the easygoing people of Toussaint, where even the most pious prefer to keep God to themselves. Du Pré is content to ignore the evangelists, until a mountain hike turns up the body of a little girl. Although he has no hard evidence, instinct tells him that the fundamentalists may be to blame. Du Pré hunts the countryside for the young girl's killer, wishing as always that the outside world would leave his beloved Montana alone. In this "admirable, highly original" series, "Du Pré, a Métis Indian, ignores the speed limit, smokes hand-rolled cigarettes and drinks whisky like it was water. He also plays fiddle like an angel, takes care of his friends and defends the weak with equal passion" (Publishers Weekly). Nails is the 13th book in The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

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.

Review :
"Highly original . . . the oddball characters beloved by Bowen fans are on hand, as charming as ever." --Publishers Weekly "The Du Pré mysteries never move directly from victim to killer, offering, instead, various side trips to ponder the puzzles of modern life such as preemptive war, religious zealotry, and, of course, the ever-baffling affairs of the heart." --Booklist "Riding with Du Pré is some kind of enchantment. . . . Peter Bowen writes mysteries that are truly mysterious--informed by Western legend, steeped in Indian superstition." --The New York Times Book Review