A decades-old plane crash leads Du Pr to possible murder, and to a landowner with dark secrets Officially, Gabriel Du Pr is the cattle inspector for Toussaint, Montana, responsible for making sure that no one tries to sell cattle branded by another ranch. Unofficially, he is responsible for much more than cows' backsides. The barren country around Toussaint is too vast for the town's small police force, and so, when needed, this hard-nosed hybrid of Indian and Frenchman lends a hand. When the Sheriff offers gas money to investigate newly discovered plane wreckage in the desert, Du Pr quickly finds himself embroiled in a mystery stretching back a generation. For three decades the crashed plane has sat in the sun as the bodies inside rotted away to their bones. Two skeletons are whole, but for one nothing remains but the hands, skull, and the bullet that ended his life. The crime was hidden long ago, but in the Montana badlands, nothing stays buried forever. "Bowen has taken the antihero of Hemingway and Hammett and brought him up to date. . . . As the best literary novels are able to do, Coyote Wind brings many worlds together and hones the language to create a fresh, memorable character and a profound vision." -The New York Times Book Review "Distinguished by realistic dialogue, a fluid inclusion of local history and Du Pr 's convincing concern with guilt, repentance and tradition, this is a deeply textured tale." -Publishers Weekly "Gabe's rhythmic, regional voice and his sly wit take the novel to another level." -Booklist 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 Pr , a mixed-race lawman living in fictional Toussaint, Montana. Bowen has written thirteen novels in the series, in which Du Pr gets tangled up in everything from cold-blooded murder to the hunt for rare fossils. Bowen continues to live and write in Livingston, Montana.