Thunder Horse

Description

"A terrific writer . . . Thunder Horse makes this reviewer want to race to the bookstore for the rest of the Gabriel Du Pre series" (Rocky Mountain News). Usually it takes more than one beer to make the Toussaint Saloon shake. When the earthquake hits, part-time deputy Gabriel Du Pre and his friends are lamenting the fishing resort a Japanese firm has planned for their small town. The floor trembles, the lights go out, and glass rains from the walls. When they emerge from the bar, they see a new landscape. Roads are mangled, mountains have shifted, and the spring where the Japanese businessmen had planned to build their resort is no more. In its place is an uprooted Indian burial ground-and a massive headache for Du Pre. As local Native American tribes fight over the ancient remains, a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth is found in the hands of a murdered anthropologist. Du Pre had just wanted a beer. Instead he found a murder sixty-five million years in the making. Thunder Horse is the 5th 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.

"Strange, seductive . . . Haunting . . . The wonder of these voices is that they are also blunt and crude, soaked in whiskey and raspy from laughter, but still capable of leaving echoes." -The New York Times Book Review "Seductive . . . blunt and crude, soaked in whisky and raspy from laughter, but still capable of leaving echoes." -The New York Times "Idiosyncratic, convincing and marked by thoroughly distinctive rhythms of dialogue, Bowen's Du Pre series claims unique territory in the genre." -Publishers Weekly "Hilarious as the satire often is, what makes these stories so rare is the byplay among the natives. . . . Thunder Horse is a wise tale of the land that wears its idealism as casually as a pair of old jeans." -The Washington Post Book World