Badlands

by Peter Bowen and Christopher Lane

Published 1 May 2003
A secretive millennial cult from California purchases a ranch on the outskirts of the Montana badlands---the eerily silent, dry, and windy dead zone---and the Toussaint townsfolk are none too pleased.
The cult members keep to themselves, but the suspicious circumstances under which they've arrived have Gabriel Du Pre questioning their motives and seeking answers. He soon learns from a friend in the FBI that seven of the cult's recently defected members were killed---each shot to death---but no arrests have been made. Then another shooting occurs at the perimeter of the ranch, and Du Pre finds himself blindly searching for a killer, an explanation for the murders, and the identity of the cult's elusive leader.
With "Badlands," his tenth novel in this acclaimed series, Peter Bowen has written his most timely and chilling novel to date: a story of faceless terror told in lyrical prose and steeped in the Metis tradition of storytelling.

Coyote Wind

by Peter Bowen

Published 1 July 1994
First in the crime-fiction series set in the modern-day west, starring a half-French, half-Indian “character of legendary proportions” (Ridley Pearson).
 
Officially, Gabriel Du Pré is the cattle inspector for Toussaint, Montana, responsible for making sure no one tries to sell livestock branded by another ranch. Unofficially, he is responsible for much more than cows’ backsides. The barren country around Toussaint is too vast for the town’s small police force, and so, when needed, this hard-nosed Métis Indian lends a hand. When the sheriff offers gas money to investigate newly discovered plane wreckage in the desert, Du Pré quickly finds himself embroiled in a mystery stretching back a generation.
 
For three decades, the crashed plane sat in the sun as the bodies inside rotted away to their bones. Two skeletons are whole, but for one nothing remains but the hands, the skull, and the bullet that ended his life. The crime was hidden long ago, but in the Montana badlands, nothing stays buried forever . . .
 
In Gabriel Du Pré, “Bowen has taken the antihero of Hemingway and Hammett and brought him up to date . . . a fresh, memorable character” (The New York Times Book Review).