Ash Child: A Montana Mystery Featuring Gabriel Du Pre

From Publishers Weekly
This compelling series, set in a contemporary Wild West where little old ladies come into the saloon, order red beers and go home and shoot at meddlesome strangers, offers another success. Gabriel Du Pre (last seen in 2001's Cruzatte and Maria) is back, not in the best of health but as curious and stubborn as ever. An old woman, Maddy Collins (she of the red beers), is beaten to death, and when Du Pre looks into it, he's knocked on the head as well. Two teenagers, good kids who've chosen bad friends, jump out as obvious suspects. The two disappear, which seems to confirm their guilt. With the Montana weather dry and hot, the threat of fire hangs over the area, creating nearly unbearable suspense. Beyond basic safety measures, there's nothing that can be done to guarantee that the Wolf Mountains and all the nearby houses will not go up in flames. Sure enough, fire breaks out. The discovery of the two teenagers' bodies on a burned hill makes it tragically clear that they weren't guilty. As fires spread, the fear of arson spurs Du Pre to further danger in an effort to find the truth. Du Pre's beloved, Madelaine, confers with the wise old Benetsee as Du Pre goes up against the Forest Service. There's a wonderful drawl to the pace here: though there's plenty of action, there's also time to enjoy the laconic, highly nuanced language and to catch up on the interwoven history of these folks in the case of the mysterious, powerful Benetsee, a history may travel back centuries. It's a pleasure to read a story that was clearly written with pleasure.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Maddy Collins, a reclusive woman on the shady side of 80, is found dead in her little house near Toussaint, Montana, an ax driven halfway through her skull. Gabe Du Pre, part-time fiddler and occasional unofficial deputy, offers to help with the investigation. Suspecting that Maddy's murder has something to do with her house, he decides to watch the place; after seeing two teenagers lurking outside, he is knocked unconscious. When Gabe leaves the hospital, the driest season in years has sparked fires in the nearby Wolf Mountains. The firefighters find the two teenagers in one of the culverts, burned beyond recognition. Gabe is sure the death of Maddy, the two teenagers, and the Wolf Mountain fires are all related, but he will have to call on his Metis Indian magic and generations of pioneer common sense to understand the connection. Plot summaries of Gabe Du Pre novels are inevitably inadequate. Bowen's stories are always well constructed and very intelligent, but they are never about whodunit. Like so many outstanding but wildly different crime series, from James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels to Steven Havill's Bill Gastner series, the Du Pre stories are about a vanishing way of life and the determined souls who fight a rear-guard action to keep it alive. Du Pre and his Toussaint neighbors represent a proud rural America that resists the technological tsunami engulfing the land; they roll their own smokes, make music while they drink ditch whiskey, value old friends, and are suspicious of strangers. Don't miss them in this dazzling entry in a wonderful series. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Jane Dickinson, Denver Rocky Mountain News
"Best reason to read: Bowen's take on the rural West and his wonderful characters..."


Book Description
It's dry season in Montana, and fires blazing west of Touissant have spread to the Wolf Mountains. Métis-Indian fiddler, tracker, and reluctant sleuth Gabriel Du Pré suspects the fires have been intentionally set and are linked to the recent murder of Old Maddy Collins, an eccentric woman found in her living room, her head beaten in with a cast-iron hatchet. Du Pré's suspicions are heightened when two teenagers snooping around Maddy's house turn up dead in the mountains, buried beneath ash and riddled with bullet wounds.

With its sly wit and comic touches, combined with colorful characters and lyrical prose evocative of Montana, Peter Bowen's Ash Child makes for an exceptionally rich and deeply satisfying novel.



About the Author
Peter Bowen, a Montanan, writes of the West. Cowboy, hunting and fishing guide, folksinger, poet, essayist, and novelist, he's written the picaresque Yellowstone Kelly historical novels, humor columns and essays on blood sports as Coyote Jack, and the Gabriel Du Pré mysteries, in part because "the Métis are a great people, a wonderful people, and not many Americans know anything about them."



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"Cowboys," a Montana woman says early in Gabriel Du Pre's ninth adventure (Cruzatte and Maria, 2001, etc.), "have the smarts of anvils." But she says it more or less lovingly, and the fact is-as anyone in tiny Toussaint, way up in the high country, will tell you-that whenever a tough knot needs unraveling, you send for Du Pre, that quintessential cowboy and master unraveler. And if he's not busy expertly fiddling or philosophizing or imbibing his favorite tipple, "the whisky ditch," he'll tackle the toughest puzzle. Like the mystery surrounding poor old Maddy Collins. Who'd want to take a hatchet to a woman near 90, leave her bloody and lifeless on the floor of her remote cabin, and not bother to look for the $800 she had stashed in a bureau drawer? The case involves an awful lot of suspects-many of whose motives, unfortunately, are more obscure than good mystery-mongering requires-and an awful lot of burning trees. The dry season has descended on the area just west of Toussaint in a way that portends massive forest fires, some already burning ferociously. Were they started intentionally? Is Maddy's murder somehow connected to them? Who is that enigmatic good guy so indistinguishable from a bad guy? Count on anvil-headed Du Pre to figure it all out. Quirky dialogue, flamboyant people, the usual Du Pre fun. Bowen fans are doubtless inured by now to plots that go up in smoke.


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