If you haven't read a Gabriel DuPre novel before, start with Coyote Wind. Pete Bowen's style /voice needs to age on the reader. While the venues of Montana are as dramatic as New Mexico Bowen's discriptions are basic compared to Hillerman's. Further, Dupre's dialogue couples both the spoken word and the true thought in one statement. The comparisons are delightful once you get use to the pattern. Lastly the plot is not a metaphysical as Hillerman but spirtuality is a definitive resource to Dupre. Profanity is too gratuitous for a sly character such as Dupre but that's the author's style. And if you have daughters, there is symphysis

A young, female corpse without her jaw and teeth is found along the side of the Hi-Line near Toussaint, Montana. The identity of the victim cannot be determined due to the mutilation of the body. Soon more corpses show up in the same mutilated shape. FBI agent Harvey Wallace obtains Du Pre's help to catch a couple of killers, who have murdered girls throughout Canada and the U.S. for too many years. Making the deaths and subsequent investigation even more personal, Du Pre's lover Madelaine finds her own daughter missing. Du Pre promises to do everything he can to find the Hi-Line killer(s). To do so, he must learn to think like a serial killer, but pray what he learns does not become an intricate part of his persona. His most fervent hope is that he stops the killers before there are additional victims. NOTCHES is an interesting mystery for fans who enjoy superb characterization. Du Pre is a great protagonist and his support cast are top rate characters, and no one brings Montana more alive then Peter Bowen. However, the simple identification of the two killers add nothing to the who-done-it; thereby leaving fans of that sub-genre looking elsewhere for their reading material. Harriet Klausner -----

Sometimes a family can live like an unhealed sore in the body of a community, threatening to infect the innocent, generation after generation. In the case of the Messmer family, evil skipped a generation then returned full force to destroy what remained of the good.

This sixth Gabriel Du Pré mystery begins at an auction on the Messmer family ranch, about forty miles west of Toussaint. The current owners died in a road accident and the one remaining son is selling almost all of the moveable property. The FBI wants Du Pré to keep an eye on the ranch and the surviving son, but he resists the request of Harvey Wallace, aka Harvey Weasel Fat, Blackfoot and FBI agent:

"'I am old, tired, want to drink, sleep, play a little music,' said Du Pré. 'You call, I get no sleep, drink too much, don't play music, maybe get shot at, something. Maybe I hang up, you call back I am gone, no one knows where.'"

Du Pré doesn't disappear but his friend, the Shaman Benetsee does (at least, temporarily). Something evil is afoot on the Messmer ranch, something so dangerous that Du Pré's long-time mistress, Madelaine decides to pay a visit to her Turtle Mountain kin. Du Pré, who is on the villains' hit list bunks up with his friends Bart and Booger Tom.

My problem with this Du Pré mystery is that "Long Son"s plot loses needed focus about half way through. The villains become more generic, as does their evil-doing. Du Pré puts his tracking skills to work at the ranch, and later at Benetsee's cabin, but his heart isn't really in the search---especially when it becomes clear that one of the villains has saved Du Pré's life.

Even as the plot tangles in on itself, the author, Peter Bowen moves from strength to strength in allowing his readers to experience the haunting, intensely familial, whisky-soaked lives of his Métis characters. 'The Song of Genevette' is an old Métis ballad whose verses Du Pré must complete in order to find the murderer. It also leads him into the heart of the evil that seeped down through generations of Messmers, and caused their ultimate doom.

Gabriel Du Pré is definitely one of my favorite characters in fiction...as is Bart Fascelli. Anyone familiar with Bowen's writing will be right at home with Long Son. Readers looking for an introduction to Bowen would be better off starting with Notches or Wolf, No Wolf.

The story is, as usual, wandering. Readers who like to try and solve the mystery beforehand will be tested not by the complexity of the mystery but by the diversity of its elements. In the end, it's good Bowen, if not his best Du Pré work. The stories of the Métis are, as usual, well worth the read in and of themselves.

Regarding comments by Kirkus and other reviewers, a couple of items. First, the dialect is authentic, if only to a specific population of Montanans. Just because you don't recognize it doesn't make it nonexistent. Also, Montana does have a daytime speed limit. So I'm not sure where that criticism comes from.

Kirkus objects to the "wandering plot" and "casually obscene" conversation. I don't find that the plot wanders any more than Bowen's normal wont, and my daily conversations are no more "casually obscene" than Du Pré's. Maybe it's just where I'm from.

Good writer, good read. Money well spent.

I have read and enjoyed all of Peter Bowen's novels. LONG SON is enjoyable for its unique writing style, the colorful language, the Montana setting, and the very likable characters.

Maybe you have to have read the previous books in the Gabriel Du Pre series to know all the connections and relationships that make up this novel. I couldn't figure out whether Du Pre and Madelaine were married or just lovers and the book never made it clear. Du Pre runs around in a police cruiser complete with a light bar, is allowed by the local police to sleep in a crime scene, but has no police powers or offical status. He drinks ditches, whatever they are, and the only clue given by the novel is that they have whiskey in them. His reaction to almost anything that happens is to nod. "Du Pre nodded" must appear at least two or three times on every page.
I hate to be negative in the face of all this praise but this book just doesn't do it for me. I like a bit more clarity in what I read. I can put up with the unusual dialect but I'd like to know who's married to who and why Du Pre drives a police cruiser but isn't a law enforcement officer and please, for God's sake, somebody tell me what a "ditch" is!

Do not be cozzened by the fulsome praise of #1 into buying this book. Despite her claim, Peter Bowen does not do "for Montana what Tony Hillerman does for New Mexico". Nevertheless Ash Child contains some shiny nuggets of writing that may justify carting it home from the library.

Bowen's central characters are Gabriel Du Pre and Madelaine Placquemines, Metis (people of mixed Native American and European ancestory) living in "Toussaint" in central Montana. Gabriel has no visible means of support (we are told he used to be a brand inspector) and Madelaine works in the local bar. Bowen says he chose to use Metis because "the Metis are a great people, a wonderful people, and not many Americans know anything about them." Unfortunately Ash Child does little to alleviate that deficiency apart from rendering the dialogue of Gabriel and Madelaine into dialect. The reader learns nothing about the history or culture of Metis -- unless one assunes they all subsist on a diet of bourbon ditches and "pink fizzy wine" like Gabriel and Madelaine.

In Ash Child, Montana is beset by a disastrous summer of forest fires (as in 2000), a raging Methamphetamine epidemic and a rash of murders. Bowen's pair of unlikely Metis sleuths tackle all three problems with some help from a mysterious shaman named Benetsee who communicates with the "old ones" and has the power to make fire do his bidding. Perhaps one shouldn't expect a logical plot in such a setting, but it takes more than supernatural manifestations to explain away all the loose threads in this story.

There are some traces of real gold amid the clinkers -- vivid word-pictures and arresting phrases. Example: calling the thick ash on a burnt-over hillside "the shadow of the fire". Bowen slips obscure bits of western Americana, almost like inside jokes, into his story. i.e. the Democrat wagon and using the name of a priest who was important in 19th Century central Montana for Touissant's current priest. At the same time he embraces some of the tinniest myths of Rocky Mountain libertarianism. to wit: Local ranchers and cowboys know more about fighting wild fire than the US Forest Service; vigilante justice is better than court-administered justice; millionaire ranchers are the protectors of the less fortunate citizens in their communities against the highhanded behavior of federal bureaucrats.

Wolf Mountain is dry and the fires are starting. It will be a fire of the century, Gabriel Du Pre knows. But when the fires actually start, there is more than simply nature. Du Pre may live in the boonies of Montana, but even the most remote part of America isn't immune to murder, arson, or drugs. When an old woman is murdered, Du Pre is thrust into a strange world where no one is exactly as they appear, but where the danger is incredibly real.

Author Peter Bowen uses a powerful and distinctive voice to describe the lives of the Metis Indians and the ranchers who survive in the harsh lands of Montana. Du Pre relies on a combination of bull-headed bravery, investigating, and Native American magic to learn the truth. In Bowen's novels, the magic is real, and the result is often close to magic itself.

With its wealth of intriguing characters and its vivid descriptions of the land and people of Montana, ASH CHILD is a fine and compelling novel. I would have liked to see a stronger connection between the drug angle and the rest of the mystery, but it is hard to quibble with Bowen's work.

The true story of Peter Tchaikowsky and Nadejda von Meck has never been told until now.

That the wife of a nobleman, a woman who was beautiful, popular, fabulously wealthy -- the mother of eleven children -- for years lavished her attention and practically devoted her entire waking and dreaming existence to a composer whom she never met is, of course, well known.

But why she did this -- why during the thirteen years of their friendship they book took extreme measures never to meet -- why she permitted Tchaikowsky to marry another woman -- why she later gave him money to get a divorce -- why Tchaikowsky alternated between the heights of exaltation in his friendship and the deoths of self-abasement and despair -- is an enigma that has never been satisfactorily explained until now.

The letters upon which this biography is based were hidden for years in Mme. von Meck's household. At the outbreak of the Revolution in Russia they were seized by the Bolsheviki; the originals are now in the possession of the Soviet Government, which has refused to release them.

But fortunately for the musical world, translations of these letters were made by Barbara von Meck, the granddaughter of Nadejda; and Catherine Drinker Bowen, author of FREE ARTIST, has reconstructed the whole story.

It is a strangely moving story, the recounting of a romance that never came to full fruition, but which found its expression in music which has delighted the world with its tragic beauty and its lilting airs.

"Specimen Song" features the same cast of characters as the first book in this series, "Coyote Wind." But Gabriel Du Pré the rugged, fiddle-playing brand inspector who seemed so vulnerable and heroic in "Coyote Wind," now has his characteristics exaggerated to the point of disbelief. The same thing happens to his friends and relatives: the Métis prophet performs magic tricks; his daughter is transformed into Wonder Woman; Bart falls in love and becomes almost saintly; even Booger Tom mellows out.

Du Pré goes jaunting back and forth to Washington D.C. in Bart's private jet, after turning the brand inspection business over to his son-in-law. He also canoes through the Canadian taiga, following the river route of his Voyageur ancestors. All of this traveling is in search of a killer, but somehow Du Pré seems more blustery than heroic when he is removed from the land where he can read the turn of a leaf.

Or the body language of an enemy.

I very much hope that Du Pré returns to Big Sky Country in volume III.

Peter Bowen has taken stories about Luther "Yellowstone" Kelly and made them his. Follow Yellowstone Kelly as he hunts bears and Indians, takes a hapless band of English nobles on a buffalo hunting trip and fights with the British in the Zulu war. How Yellowstone Kelly came out of all his travails without more than scratches is beyond me, but I guess that is why they are called "tall tales".

This is a good book with some interesting stories but it is a very slow read.