Solus (The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Book 15)
Solus (The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Book 15) book cover

Solus (The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Book 15)

Price
$9.99
Publisher
Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Publication Date

Description

Praise for the Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré “Peter Bowen writes mysteries that are truly mysterious—informed by Western legend, steeped in Indian superstition.xa0.xa0.xa0. Riding with Du Pré is some kind of enchantment.” — The New York Times Book Review “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 “[Peter Bowen] writes about the rural West better than anyone. .xa0.xa0. He gets it right over and over again.” — Rocky Mountain News “Beneath Bowen’s delightfully extravagant characters lurks a warning: the inevitable clashes between outsiders and natives are sometimes funny, sometimes violent, but ultimately tragic.” — Publishers Weekly 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. xa0 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.

Features & Highlights

  • Gabriel Du Pré
  • is back in action, coming to the aid of a whistleblower on the run, in this all-new novel in a “wonderfully eclectic and enjoyable series” (
  • Booklist
  • ).
  • When a hunted military whistleblower and his family need someplace to hide and someone to trust, Toussaint, Montana, is the place, and Gabriel Du Pré the man. The Métis Indian former cattle inspector and sometimes deputy is happy to offer protection, even though he’s already got his hands full with an ailing granddaughter, a meddling medicine man, and a Kazakh eagle hunter prowling the hills above town.   As a guard at a Kabul prison, Hoyt Poe witnessed his fellow soldiers abusing the Afghan inmates. Poe’s testimony threatens to expose the military contractor that led the prison’s brutal interrogation program. Now, Temple Security’s billionaire founder, Lloyd Cutler, wants him dead. But how long can the fugitive and his family lay low before Cutler’s mercenaries come to Du Pré’s hometown looking for trouble?   Packed with pulse-pounding suspense, wry humor, and the romance of small-town Montana,
  • Solus
  • continues the irresistible adventures of the one of a kind Gabriel Du Pré, “a character of legendary proportions” (
  • New York Times–
  • bestselling author Ridley Pearson).   Solus
  • is the 15th book in the
  • Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
60%
(284)
★★★★
25%
(118)
★★★
15%
(71)
★★
7%
(33)
-7%
(-33)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Peter's writing has deteriorated into nonsense

I love the first 10 Du Pre books. Peter does a great job writing about what he knows. The deterioration from Book 11 on is just incredible. From book 11 forward He does absolutely no research, destroys characters and basically rants about the ever growing list of people he imagines he hates through his characters If you want to understand how alcoholism destroys a writers ability to function/write then read the entire series as a study in alcoholic delusion / dementia. If you want to enjoy the series read no further than book 12 or you will regret it.
10 people found this helpful
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The last of Gabriel DuPre

Solus is the 15th and last in this series of novels about the people of rural eastern Montana. Bowen, who died recently, will be writing no more about Gabriel DuPre. The entire series is a paean to a fast vanishing way of life in a fast changing world. The novels may be read in any order, but it was fun to start at the beginning and immerse myself in Gabriel’s world for two weeks. Haven’t had a read like that since I re-read all 26 of Richard Stark’s Parker novels in a long marathon winter of 2018. Start anywhere, but do start. Bowen is a writer who will go into my permanent collection beside such other Western writers as Don Berry and Elmore Leonard. The series is a keeper.
5 people found this helpful
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Pet Peeve - Political pleasure reading

Three stars for political content in pleasure reading, which is a particular pet peeve of mine. I have enjoyed quite a few books in this series. This one came up as a special on Early Bird Books, so I bought it. I could not get past the Bible-thumping, murderous, right-night extremists, an oxymoron of the first order, portrayed as a vicious para-military contractor that goes after an innocent whistleblower and his family. DuPre’ (who seems to have lost some of his charming Métis dialect in this book) and company come to the rescue, with help from all the usual characters. I hope the political aspect is a departure for this author. If not, I am sad to see him go.
3 people found this helpful
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Montana Brand Inspector and Occasional Deputy Sheriff Gabriel Du Pre Finally Returns

After a three-year absence, author Peter Bowen returns with the fifteenth novel in his series featuring Gabriel Du Pre, a Metis Indian living in Montana who has worked as a brand inspector and occasional deputy sheriff. Du Pre is now well along in life, with adult grandchildren, but it hasn't slowed him down a bit. He still drinks and smokes and plays the fiddle with the best of them, and it's great to have him back.

In this novel, Du Pre comes to the assistance of a decorated former soldier named Hoyt Poe. While serving as a guard at a prison in Kabul, Poe witnessed the employees of a private contractor abusing prisoners. Poe did the right thing and reported the abuse. He then testified against the men he saw committing the crimes.

His efforts earned him the enmity of the thugs who run the contracting firm and of their powerful political masters in the nation's capital. Poe is now running for his life and is resettled out in Du Pre's home town of Toussaint in rural Montana. But Poe's enemies are relentless and well-connected, and even out in the middle of nowhere and even with the assistance of Gabriel Du Pre, Poe and his family may not be safe.

This is a compelling story that, given the current political climate, has more than a little ring of truth about it. But above and beyond that, this and the other books in the series are character-driven novels, and Bowen has created a wonderful supporting cast surrounding his protagonist. The sense of place is so sharp that the fictional Toussaint comes fully to life, and returning to the community after a three-year absence is like returning home again. I very much hope that it will not be another three years before we get a chance to go back.
1 people found this helpful
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Gabriel DuPre Lives

This is another of Peter Bowen's Gabriel DuPre novels. The mystery in this book is more social commentary than who-dunnit but the chance to visit Toussaint Montana with Gabriel, Madeleine, Bart, Father Van DerHuevel, etc. Is so satisfying it does not matter. As you can tell by the date on the review, I gulped this down in one day.
1 people found this helpful
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Awesome read

This whole series, the Gabriel Du Pre books, has be a joy to read…Du Pre and his whole family are wonderful characters that entertain but somehow become part of your experience beyond the books. The Metis are anything but simple and the dialogue, the way Bowen constructs their language, touches something inside that makes you chuckle. They have great depth and historical and familial connection. The mysteries are engaging, and Bowen leaves just enough unsaid to keep you in it until the very end…and it’s often an end you don’t expect. I only hope Bowen keeps writing…
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End of the series, so far...

What a great series! Wish and watch for more but this was really a good bunch of stories, great characters and good dialogue. It is also a deep study in an interesting culture. Peter Bowen has done an amazing work of research and writing.
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Solus

I have just finished the 15th book. I will miss the characters and the authors skills portraying them and Montana. Thank you Mr. Bowen.
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Long On Dialog

Great characters but they spend an awful lot of time going to and fro. Speaks to the horror of war and its cost
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Okay

I am not a big fan of the Gabriel Du Pre series by Peter Bowen but enjoy reading anything about Montana.