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STEWBALL
by Peter Bowen
St Martin's Minotaur, April 2005
224 pages
$22.95
ISBN: 031227730X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Flat out, I admit it. I was wrong. I thought Peter Bowen was not for me. I vaguely recall reading an early book in the Gabriel Du Pré series and not liking it. Either I've gotten smarter or he's gotten better; I suspect the former.

This is the 12th Gabriel Du Pré book and it just flowed for me. In part, I'm taken completely by the characters and the way they talk. Gabriel and his family are Metis. Having assumed most Metis were in Canada, I had to get past my lack of knowledge pretty fast. And yes, there are some excellent websites on the Metis if you don't know who they are. I recommend a search. The family and community are made up of fiercely independent folks in Montana, but they contradict totally the image of the other fiercely independent Montanan, the white supremacist.

Bowen's been there before -- it's got to be a given for an author dealing with modern day Montana and folks who aren't 'Aryan', but here, it's a little more complicated. Gabriel's aunt comes to him to say her husband -- fourth? eighth? -- has gone missing. In fact he turns up dead, after having worked for the FBI as an informant. Money is making its way into Montana in strange ways, in the form of gambling on brush races -- short, illegal, out of the way horse races among people with lots of money and often very scary politics.

The language of the Metis influences the English that most folks speak in this book; it might be a challenge for some readers, but I found that it just made the transition from my city life into the plains of Montana, the small towns easy and simple. It's a wonderful thing for me to hear regional accents and different ways of speaking, and for them to come across as so alive in a book.

The Du Pré/Fortier clan is impressive; Lourdes is awfully young to be risking her life racing horses so that her grandfather and his friend, Booger Tom, can get close to the people who might have ordered Badger's death. But "the warrior women", Lourdes' mother (and Gabriel's daughter) and his lover Madeleine give their approval, trusting that they've raised or helped raise some awfully strong and strong-minded children. Which indeed they have; Pallas is pretty scary, for example. She's what, 11? And knows she's going to marry Charles Van Dusen, aka Ripper, a young FBI guy. And everyone pretty much is patting Ripper on the shoulder saying "too bad, you're done for."

I like that the characters aren't what they seem at first glance. Booger Tom (oy, that name?) seems like an old drunk, but he's awfully sharp, and awfully knowledgeable about the world and doesn't want to see the evils of extremism and racism affect his friends, his life.

Harvey Wallace is another FBI agent, a Blackfoot Indian, stationed in DC but not very happy with his agency; if you're not out chasing terrorists, you get no support, even though there's lots of other horrible crime to be stopped in the US. And Harvey suspects that in some cases, some people in the FBI support some of the goals of the right-wing extremists. The ties between terrorists of all kinds are murky, of course, so it's hard to say what's really going on. But that's cool. Bowen can write it so it works.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, March 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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