Customer Reviews

Stewball (Gabriel Du Pre Mystery)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gabriel Du Pre meets with his Aunt Pauline at the Toussaint Saloon. She tells him her latest husband Badger has gone missing for two weeks and that the FBI is somehow involved. She wants him to call his FBI friend to find out what happened to her spouse. Du Pre does exactly that and finds Badger was caught coming across the Canadian border with ten thousand valium tablets. Badger agreed to infiltrate a white supremacist and the charges against him will be greatly reduced.

There is heavy gambling at these races and the FBI supplied him with marked money that turned out to be counterfeit. The group killed Badger but the Feds still wants someone to infiltrate the urban theorist group. Du Pre has his granddaughter ride a horse in the races in the hopes that he will be accepted by the group and learn who the real leaders are. It is a dangerous situation but Du Pre has it under control until the leader escapes during an FBI raid. Du Pre is determined to be the one to find him no matter how long it takes.

Du Pre is a unique, independent and ageless protagonist who goes his own way and doesn't let anyone stop him from doing what he wants. It is lucky for law enforcement that he is on the side of Justice because he would make an untouchable crook. Peter Bowen does for Montana what Tony Hillerman does for New Mexico. Perhaps the most delightful character in this novel is STEWBALL, the horse that is in love with Du Pre's granddaughter Lourdes.

Harriet Klausner

All of Peter Bowen's books are a fast, furious, and a fun read, including Stewball. I love Gabriel's friends and family. I also love the focus on Metis and their culture, because I am familiar with it, and also with the geographic areas the stories tend to be set in. The characters are pretty much like real people seen though a sardonic eye, with a bit of poetic license thrown in. They are real enough to draw you into their concerns but exaggerated enough to make it fun. May the ink never dry in Mr. Bowen's pens.

I was as puzzled by this book's ending as I have been with all of Peter Bowen's endings since "Ash Child." I finished it, but I felt like I'd been dragged through a séance in the sweat lodge with the inscrutable Benetsee. Maybe the meaning of "Stewball"s conclusion will come to me in a dream.

At least the rich neo-nazi ranchers come out of this book nearly as whupped as the readers. Not that I think they don't deserve a good bashing, but I wasn't quite sure what the evil rancher intended to do with his vintage World War II P-38. He goes wooshing around in it at the end of the book, but he has no specific target that the readers need to worry about like an NAACP Convention or an American Civil Liberties Union picnic or a Navaho Tribal Council.

Nobody out on the prairie, Mr. Blackmore, except us chickens. We're all Aryan chickens so don't be pointing those cannons at us.

Oh well, I get the feeling the author wrote "Stewball" on automatic pilot. It consists mainly of non-expletive-deleted dialog between characters from his previous books. Luckily, Bowen provides an index of characters at the beginning of this book; otherwise new readers will never be able to figure out who's who.

Booger Tom, one of my favorite characters from previous novels in the Du Pré mystery series, gets lots of face time in "Stewball." He is pretending to be a race horse trainer. Bowen also clues us in on this old ranch hand's background: he earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for valor at Heartbreak Ridge in Korea, and also fought in France and Austria in WWII.

This old guy should be writing his memoirs, not mending barbwire and worming cows!

Anyway, Du Pré, the retired brand inspector and Booger Tom team up to race an Australian Quarter Horse named Stewball in brush races attended by neo-nazi ranchers. Du Pré's FBI buddy, Harvey Wallace asks them to discover who murdered one of his snitches, who was passing counterfeit money at a brush race. The snitch also happened to be married to one of Du Pré's aunts.

That's about all the plot there is. Benetsee holds a couple of séances in his sweat lodge and dons his war paint. Du Pré laces on his Cree running moccasins and rubs dirty engine oil on his face. He shoots a couple of bad guys with his MP-40, sets fire to a bunch of aviation fuel drums, and drinks a whole lot of bourbon.

Stewball wins a few races.

That's it, except for some long-winded, expletive-not-deleted lectures on the American far-right.

P.S. Mr. Bowen, if Stewball is a blue roan, he has a black mane and tail, not gray or white.

First Line: Du Pré and Madelaine and Pallas were standing in the Billings Airport.

When Du Pré's Aunt Pauline asks him for help in finding her missing husband, Badger, Du Pré reluctantly agrees. The first thing he finds is Badger's body out in the middle of nowhere with a bullet hole in the base of his skull.

Since Badger was known to be mixed up in all sorts of things that agencies like the FBI would be interested in, Du Pré calls his FBI friend, Harvey Wallace, with the information. Before you know it, Du Pré has gone undercover with a pair of horses and a jockey in the world of illegal brush racing.

I enjoy the interactions of Du Pré, his partner of many years, Madelaine, and his children and grandchildren, and this book has plenty of that. When Stewball goes into the world of brush racing, it is as if the book has wings. Bowen could easily have included a hundred more pages about this and I would not have tired of it.

This is another strong entry in one of my favorite series, but I can't help being rather sad. There's only one book left, and then there will be no more new entertaining tales of this wonderful, colorful fiddle player.

Once we became acquainted with Peter Bowen's Montana Mysteries with Gabriel DuPre, Mdelaine, Benetsee, and the other Toussaint regulars, we were hooked.
How could we miss any of their adventures, their irreverent attitude, their music, their Metis culture.
They have become real people we have enjoyed knowing.

The Bowen mystery series are not the Great American Novel, and yes they are a bit formulaic, but the mysteries are always complex and often intertwined in the lives of multiple characters often appearing in multiple books and story lines. The dialogue is unique to the Montana Mysteries and well worth the price of admission.

This particular book was not among the best in that Bowen really strained credulity to get a bunch of neo-nazi crazies accepted as somewhat normal gun-owners. I though this strained the plot and really had the main characters playing out scenarios and expressing (or at least not countering) some pretty silly anti-gun sentiments. I can't accept the premise and the story line is also strained, as if Bowen has gotten too much flak for berating lefties and not enough rightwing-bashing in earlier novels and is trying to cozy up to an ultra-liberal new love interest at the expense of his normally more fluid and authentic western US attitudes. Get back to Red State acceptance! This is the first review I have given less than a 4-star rating to a Dupre novel.

We're back in another trip to the world of the Metis, who inhabit Montana and parts north, and have a culture uniquely their own - full of music, a love for the independent life, and a fractured grammar that makes backwards, everything. Peter Bowen has spent a lifetime telling the stories of Gabriel du Pres, cattle inspector, brilliant fiddle player, and solver of mysteries. Don't get the idea that Gabriel is a superman. He is carefully herded and guarded by his woman Madelaine, his daughters, madeliane's daughters, and Benetsee the shaman.

In Stewball, Gabriel sets out to find Auntie Pauline's latest boyfriend, and finds a corpse instead. Badger, Gabriel discovers, was doing the FBI a favor, and apparently ran into something bigger than he expected - big stakes horse racing and right wing militancy. Gabriel decides to get involved. Soon he and Booger Tom are the front men in a sting operation that seems to involve the FBI, the ATF, and any other law enforcement organization in the neighborhood.

As always, this story is more about the people than it is about the crime. Of everyone who appears though, the star of this story is Lourdes, Madelaine's oldest daughter, a natural horsewoman, and every bit as frightening as the other women in our hero's life, including Lourde's sister, Pallas, 10-year-old genius and evil spirit.

It is Lourdes' riding skills on Stewball that enable Gabriel and Tom to appear as wealthy horse racers so as to infiltrate the secret brush races and expose the doings of a closed circle of plotters. But men have died already, and the members of the club are wealthy enough to buy their way clean. The forces are evenly matched, but never count a determined Metis out of any fight.

For all its serious moments, Bowen tells this story with a very light touch and vivid characterization. I have come to love all the du Pres stories, but Stewball is special, full of all the things that makes this series entertaining. For all that this is the twelfth book in the series, you could easily start right here. Most likely you will go back and read them all.