Specimen Song

A serial killer follows Du Pré from Washington, DC, back to MontanaA lost and frightened horse plods down the National Mall, startling the crowd. When Gabriel Du Pré spots the confused animal, the connection is immediate, for neither of these creatures belongs in the sweltering heat of a DC summer. Du Pré, a Métis Indian from the wilds of Montana, calms the horse and leads it to the nearest policeman. Du Pré is in Washington to play his people''s music for a Smithsonian festival, but after leading the horse to safety, he encounters a murder instead. The dead woman is Cree Indian, come down from Canada to sing in the festival. Du Pré tries to put her death out of his mind and returns to Montana, but more killings follow: each time with a primitive weapon, each time foretold by a local shaman. As the body count rises and the killer closes on Du Pré, the lawman vows to never again make the mistake of leaving Montana."Bowen''s prose is often droll and his characters well-etched." -Publishers Weekly "One of the most unusual characters working the fictional homicide beat . . . powerfully poetic but unsentimental." -Booklist "The best of Tony Hillerman meets Zane Grey . . . Du Pré is a character of legendary proportions." -Ridley Pearson, author of The Angel Maker and No WitnessPeter Bowen (b. 1945) is an author best known for 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, Bowen 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. Bowen has written thirteen 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.