Nails (Gabriel Du Pre, 13)

When Gabriel Du Pré's precocious granddaughter, Pallas, returns from her studies in Washington, D.C., the entire clan in Toussaint, Montana, is happy to see her. Except Du Pré, that is, because the crotchety old fiddlin' cowboy knows that where Pallas goes, trouble is likely to follow. A van full of praying, protesting fundamentalist Christians has arrived in Toussaint at just about the same time. A young soldier follows, just back from Iraq, missing a leg, an eye, and his grip on reality. Du Pré suspects that he's going to have his hands full for the foreseeable future. Graffiti appears on the door of clumsy Father Van Den Heuvel's church, and a cryptic phone call from a missing girl causes concern in town. When a confluence of these strange events and even stranger people threatens problems that even laid-back Du Pré can't ignore, another quirky, compelling, and purely enjoyable mystery unfolds in Peter Bowen's Montana, a land trouble tends to visit often, with unpredictable but fiercely entertaining results.