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Sometimes life takes strange twists and turns, and people get involved in events that normally would never concern them. And no good deed goes unpunished. So it is in Peter Bowen's BITTER CREEK. An old military buddy of Gabriel's DuPre's girlfriend Madelaine's son Chappie has come to take him to get a medal he earned in Iraq. Chappie can't sleep but he can pass out, so when Gabriel and John Patchen find him, he is very hung over. They all end up in Benetsee's sweat lodge, getting Chappie sober enough to deal with Patchen and his request. So far, the path seems fairly straight, and perhaps reasonably narrow. Then John Patchen hears the voices, the voices that nobody else hears, the voices saying, "Bitter Creek" over and over again. These are not voices that John can ignore.
Bowen writes with clarity and empathy about many social issues over the course of this series. The characters that people his books have real emotions, real motives, real flaws. This is as true in BITTER CREEK as in any of his previous books. Gabriel is a "character" as well as a character - he seems to have reached both the age and the mind-set where he truly doesn't care about some consequences, although he is aware of them and will do his best to avoid them if he can. If he can't? Well, he'll cope with that problem when it gets there. This makes for some interesting moments.
While there are plenty of surprises along the road, and the road itself is interesting, the story seems at times a little too facile. The consequences, as so often happens in "real life" are not always applied evenly or fairly. The aftertaste isn't as good as the initial expectation: not a sour or bitter taste so much as a kind of flatness.
§ P.J. Coldren lives in northern lower Michigan where she reads and reviews widely across the mystery genre when she isn't working in her local hospital pharmacy.
Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, June 2015
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