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The Stick Game
The Stick Game
The Stick Game
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The Stick Game

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A Montana deputy takes on a mining company that’s poisoning reservation children in a novel the Washington Post calls “wonderful [and] wise.”
 
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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 13, 2012
ISBN9781453246801
The Stick Game
Author

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.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Protagonist: 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".

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The Stick Game - Peter Bowen

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