Cruzatte and Maria
By Peter Bowen
4.5/5
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About this ebook
When he’s asked to serve as a consultant for a documentary about the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s expedition up the Missouri River, Gabriel Du Pré’s impulse is to flee. Eastern Montana isn’t accustomed to getting much attention, and its residents prefer it that way. But the director of the film is dating Du Pré’s daughter Maria, so this hard-bitten fiddler’s hands are tied.
The Métis Indian lawman agrees to act as a guide and help the filmmakers navigate the river, which is as deadly now as it was in 1805. The Missouri has claimed nine lives in the past three years—a suspiciously high death toll the FBI wants Du Pré to investigate. While trolling the riverbanks, Du Pré stumbles upon a national treasure: Meriwether Lewis’s lost journals, which the American government will do anything to get back. Meanwhile, when members of the film crew start dying, Du Pré begins to wonder if the locals hate outsiders so much they might be willing to kill to keep them out.
“Bowen’s exuberant storytelling mines the rich cultural history of the West . . . [and features] delightfully extravagant characters” (Publishers Weekly).
Cruzatte and Maria is the 8th 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
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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
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Reviews for Cruzatte and Maria
4 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Basic old time values--liquor, guns, trucks, medicine men, sweat lodges, and cholesterol--face down new age filmmakers, abetted by evil environmentalists. Writing is smooth, booze and politics are not.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Really, these are not mystery novels. They are novels, very good novels, about the rural west that happen to have some murders and sleuthing. And laughter, fiddle-playing, drinking, smoking, cussing, and love.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Protagonist: Gabriel Du Pr?, M?tis fiddler par excellenceSetting: present-day Montana along the Missouri RiverSeries: #8First Line: Du Pr? limped into the Toussaint Saloon.Strong, willful Gabriel Du Pr? is putty in the hands of even stronger, more willful women. That's how he finds himself working as a consultant for a film crew making a movie about Lewis and Clark; his daughter Maria's boyfriend is the producer. However, when the Hollywood starlet hired to portray Sacajawea can't stand the (to her) primitive conditions, Maria finds herself with the role. Just as Du Pr? starts trying to find ways to prevent the resident Hollywood hunk from bringing out his guitar and joining in Du Pr?'s sessions, an FBI agent gets in contact with him. It seems the FBI knows what Du Pr? is doing, and since he's in the area, would he mind checking into the unexplained murders of nine people who'd last been seen boating on that stretch of the Missouri River? Du Pr? reluctantly agrees. In his spare time when he's not consulting, fiddling and looking for murderers, he somehow manages to find something that sets academia--and the US government--on fire. What he does with it will make all contrary souls like me laugh and applaud.Some folks complain that there's not a whole lot of plot to Bowen's Du Pr? novels, or a whole lot of mystery for that matter. The reply that pops first into my mind is rather blunt: who the hell cares? Normally when I read the latest edition of the Du Pr? Daily News, I hear his fiddle clearly in my mind. While reading Cruzatte and Maria, I didn't. Instead I was in a pirogue with Du Pr? paddling down the Missouri River. Like a handhewn pirogue, this book followed the currents of the river. Good use of the paddle took us to logjams of extraordinary characters, to the quicksand of history, to the shallows of the here and now. Grabbing the sides of the pirogue as we shot through some rapids, I felt the heat of the Montana sun on my shoulders and the vastness of the Montana sky stretch over my head. In many of Bowen's novels there is a clash between the "natives" and the "outsiders". Cruzatte and Maria is no exception. When fiercely independent natives live in an area coveted by outsiders with more money than sense, these clashes are inevitable. Sometimes they can be funny, sometimes they can be violent, but ultimately these clashes are always tragic. It is Bowen's strength that he can write about all of this so vividly, so naturally, in books that don't seem to have a whole lot of plot.If you can't tell by my reviews, this is one series that I wish I could get all mystery lovers to try just once. Bowen is an unsung treasure who deserves more recognition.