The Stick Game
By Peter Bowen
5/5
()
About this ebook
Something is rotten in the Fort Belknap Reservation. Life has always been tough on this barren stretch just south of the Canadian border, but now the children are getting sick. While playing his fiddle in a reservation bar, part-time deputy Gabriel Du Pré meets an accordionist who suspects the children’s health defects and low test scores are connected to pollution from the nearby Persephone gold mine.
Meanwhile, Du Pré investigates the disappearance of one of the afflicted children. When the boy turns up dead, the accordionist’s theory gains credence. It wouldn’t be the first time the rich men of Montana found wealth at the expense of the reservation’s kids. But is there something more than greed and indifference at work? Something even more sinister? Du Pré will make it his business to find out.
“In other hands, melodrama could easily rear its head and trample the scenery, but Bowen has a firm grip on his large cast of interesting players . . . [in this] tale of grace vs. greed” (Publishers Weekly).
The Stick Game is the 7th book in The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
Peter Bowen
Peter 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 fourteen 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.
Read more from Peter Bowen
The Yellowstone Kelly Novels
Related to The Stick Game
Titles in the series (21)
Bitter Creek Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Long Son Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nails Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notches Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cruzatte and Maria Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Badlands Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Specimen Song Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Solus Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stewball Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tumbler Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Stick Game Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ash Child Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thunder Horse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wolf, No Wolf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Coyote Wind Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Volume One: Coyote Wind; Specimen Song; and Wolf, No Wolf Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Coyote Wind Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Specimen Song Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Volume Two: Notches, Thunder Horse, and Long Son Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Volume Four: Badlands, The Tumbler, and Stewball Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related ebooks
Long Son Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stewball Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wolf, No Wolf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Badlands Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Volume Four: Badlands, The Tumbler, and Stewball Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Volume Two: Notches, Thunder Horse, and Long Son Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré Volume One: Coyote Wind; Specimen Song; and Wolf, No Wolf Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Cruzatte and Maria Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tumbler Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nails Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notches Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bitter Creek Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ash Child Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Specimen Song Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Solus Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thunder Horse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Coyote Wind Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Panther in the Sun Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chattering Blue Jay: Gabriel Hawke Novel, #4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAloha, Lady Blue: A Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bear Stalker: Gabriel Hawke Novel, #10 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChurlish Badger: Gabriel Hawke Novel, #8 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Territory: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dominic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Knife in the Back: A Case for Professor Sally Good Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Silent Thunder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Turkey's Fiery Demise: Gabriel Hawke Novel, #6 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeadliest of Sins Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Capricious Demise: Shandra Higheagle Mystery, #15 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Mystery For You
Pretty Girls: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Flight: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Kept Woman: A Will Trent Thriller Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Good Daughter: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5None of This Is True: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Life We Bury Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5False Witness: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paris Apartment: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Club: A Reese's Book Club Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summit Lake Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hunting Party: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The River We Remember: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Did I Kill You?: A Thriller Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone: A Murdery Mystery Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pharmacist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pieces of Her: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Woman in the Library: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The People Next Door Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Finlay Donovan Is Killing It: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jack Reacher: A Mysterious Profile Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Complete Short Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil in a Blue Dress (30th Anniversary Edition): An Easy Rawlins Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Still Life: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hidden Staircase: Nancy Drew #2 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Big Sleep Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Stick Game
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Protagonist: Gabriel Du Pr?Setting: present-day MontanaSeries: #7First Line: The night was warm for Montana.At the Crow Fair in the town of Hardin, Gabe and Madelaine meet her cousin Jeanne, whose oldest son has disappeared, and he agrees to help find Danny. Soon thereafter a crippled accordion player asks Gabe to do something about the poisoned water that caused the accordion player's birth defects. Both investigations lead to a gold-mining operation that provides many local jobs.This book would have most writers chewing up the scenery in large chunks of melodrama. Not Bowen. In other writers' hands, this light plot line and meandering narrative would completely fall apart. Not in Bowen's hands. He has a marvelous cast of characters, from Gabe and Madelaine down to folks like seventy-somethings Piney and Norris who have tried to kill each other so long they've forgotten what started it all, to the reservation police officers Joe and Harry who are forced to find humor in strange places so that they don't spend their shifts in tears. Bowen keeps a good grip on the reins, and this book becomes much greater than the sum of its parts--a quiet, believable, poignant and oftentimes humorous tale of grace versus greed. What most folks can't accomplish in a month's worth of environmental ranting, Bowen does by having Gabe pull out his fiddle and play "Billy Drank the Gold".