Wolf, No Wolf (Gabriel Du Pré Series #3)

by Peter Bowen

Overview

A half-Indian, half-French deputy with “a shrewd mind and wry sense of humor” investigates a case of homicide on the range (The New York Times Book Review).
 
Two men have been cutting fences at the ranches of Toussaint, Montana, loosing thousands of dollars’ worth of cattle to use as target practice for their .22 rifles. Are they thieves? Pranksters? Local cattle inspector and sometime deputy Gabriel Du Pré guesses they’re environmentalists, agitating for the reintroduction of native wolves to Montana’s high plains. Du Pré knows the perpetrators are trying to send a message to the ranchers of eastern Montana—he also has a hunch they’re already dead.

When the activists are indeed found shot to death, Du Pré must figure out who used them for target practice. The FBI descends, but their agents are as clueless in this territory as the hapless victims were. Clearly, one of Toussaint’s citizens committed this crime, killing to protect the traditional way of ranching life, a loyalty Du Pré shares. But if anyone’s going to arrest his people, it will be the cattle inspector himself . . .
 
Wolf, No Wolf is the third in “a wonderfully eclectic and 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).

Wolf, No Wolf is the 3rd book in The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504052344
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Series:	Gabriel Du Pré Series , #3
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	244
Sales rank:	479,989
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

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.
 

What People are Saying About This

Ridley Pearson

The best of Tony Hillerman meets Zane Grey...Du Pre is a character of legendary proportions.

Editorial Reviews

"Du Pré joins a select group including Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, and Dave Robicheaux.” —Edgar Award finalist William Hjortsberg

“Wonderfully sly . . . Bowen plays his language the way Du Pré plays violin: plaintive, humorous, wild, the sounds of the sentences as meaningful as the story.” —The Washington Post Book World
 
“Intriguing . . . Original and compelling.” —Rocky Mountain News
 
“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

From the Publisher

Fiddler, father, widower, cowboy, and lover, Du Pre has the soul of a poet, the eye of a wise man, and the heart of a comic...Mr. Bowen has taken the antihero of Hemingway and Hammett and brought him up to date.

NY Times Book Review

When a couple of rabid environmentalists start cutting barbed-wire fences and shooting cattle in an attempt to chase ranchers off their generations-old Montana spreads, fiddler/deputy Gabriel Du Pré predicts that they'll be the next shooting victims. What he doesn't predict is that the resulting range war will leave the two eco-terrorists in the dust as only the first of 18 dead, including four more anti-ranching activists (not counting half a dozen coyotes), eight mourners buried in an avalanche and mostly eaten by wolves, and then—methodically, one at a time—every police suspect who might throw any light on the mystery. Underneath the pattern of fatal shootouts with the reluctant local law and an endearing FBI agent with hair on her chest, Du Pré finds the fingerprints of the mega-ranching Martin family. But even his certainty that they're involved in the wanton killing leaves plenty of room for surprises all over the map.

Plotting as scattershot as the wholesale violence won't win any new puzzle-minded fans for Du Pré's third adventure (Specimen Song, 1995, etc.). But his unapologetically up-the-establishment point of view and Bowen's offspeed prose make him one of the most striking new regional detectives.

Kirkus Reviews