Appaloosa [first edition]

A New York Times Bestseller A richly imagined novel of the Old West, as spare and vivid as a high plains sunset, from one of the world's most talented performers. When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty town suffering at the hands of renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he has taken supplies, horses, and women for his own and left the city marshal and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, itinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunistic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary - one who raises the stakes by playing not with the rules, but with emotions. Robert B. Parker, the author of more than forty novels, has long been acknowledged as the dean of American crime fiction and has been named Grand Master of the 2002 Edgar awards by the Mystery Writers of America, an honor shared with earlier masters such as Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen. Parker's fictional Spenser inspired the ABC-TV series "Spenser: For Hire." More recently, the Spenser novels Small Vices and Thin Air have been made into television films for the A&E network. Robert B. Parker lives in Boston.