Notches

Description

"[An] enjoyable series of interest to western crime readers, especially those favoring Montana authors C. J. Box, Craig Johnson, and Keith McCafferty as well as fans of the Hillermans" (Booklist). The news is bad: five young women-so far-raped, tortured, and left in the Montana wilderness to be devoured by coyotes. It's not long before Gabriel Du Pre, Metis Indian cattle inspector and occasional deputy, gets the call from Sheriff Benny Klein, summoning him to yet another grisly crime scene-this time in his own backyard. Not far from the victim, he finds two more murdered women, their bodies arranged over each other in a cross. A message from the killer? But what does it mean? Working alongside a Blackfoot FBI agent and his feisty female partner, Du Pre, a father and grandfather with two daughters of his own, gives his all to the manhunt. But as more victims are found, and a young woman he cares about disappears, he will come to the grim realization that he must learn to think like this monster in order to catch him. "Like the most memorable creations in detective fiction, [Du Pre's] moral center is unshakeable" (Booklist). Notches is the 4th book in The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pre series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

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 Pre, a mixed-race lawman living in fictional Toussaint, Montana. He has written fifteen novels in the series, in which Du Pre gets tangled up in everything from cold-blooded murder to the hunt for rare fossils. Bowen continues to live and write in Livingston, Montana.

"A haunting tale, punched out in arresting rhythms of speech powerful as a tribal drumbeat." -Entertainment Weekly "Mesmerizing. . . . deep and poetic. . . . His spare idiom has the dry texture of ancestral dust." -The New York Times "Bowen's writing is lean and full of mordant observations. His hardy characters . . . come to life, and his wry humor provides relief from the haunting, wind-bitten cattle-ranch landscape." -Publishers Weekly