Thunder Horse

“A terrific writer . . . Thunder Horse makes this reviewer want to race to the bookstore for the rest of the Gabriel Du Pré series” (Rocky Mountain News).
 
Usually it takes more than one beer to make the Toussaint Saloon shake. When the earthquake hits, part-time deputy Gabriel Du Pré and his friends are lamenting the fishing resort a Japanese firm has planned for their small town. The floor trembles, the lights go out, and glass rains from the walls. When they emerge from the bar, they see a new landscape. Roads are mangled, mountains have shifted, and the spring where the Japanese businessmen had planned to build their resort is no more. In its place is an uprooted Indian burial ground—and a massive headache for Du Pré.
 
As local Native American tribes fight over the ancient remains, a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth is found in the hands of a murdered anthropologist. Du Pré had just wanted a beer. Instead he found a murder sixty-five million years in the making.

Thunder Horse is the 5th book in The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

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.