Robert B. Parker's later books seemed to prove the saying that you can't teach an old dog new tricks with him becoming very repetitive with his characters and stories. However, maybe this one shows that if an old dog starts gnawing on a new bone that he might chew it up a little differently. At least for a while. 
 This wasn't RBP's first attempt at a western, but it was the first book in a new series in which he introduced Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, two lawmen for hire. Their latest gig is with the town of Appaloosa where a rancher named Bragg has a bunch of thugs who are terrorizing the locals, and Bragg killed the marshal who tried to bring some of them in. Virgil and Everett aren't having too much trouble taking care of business until a pretty lady named Allie comes to town. She and Virgil become an item, but there are signs that maybe she isn't quite as loyal to Virgil as he is to her. 
 On the surface that sounds a lot of RBP's work, and that Cole and Hitch are just two old West versions of Spenser and Hawk. However, there's a couple of interesting wrinkles. First, is that this is written from the first person view of Everett, and he knows that he's essentially Virgil's sidekick and willingly follows his lead. Everett is also a slight variation on the typical RBP character. Yeah, he's reliable in a fight and operates under a certain code of behavior, but it's Virgil's code that he adopted because of his loyalty. Everett also likes to have a good time, enjoying his whiskey and regular dalliances with a prostitute he grows fond of. So he seems a bit different from the usual internalized stoics that RBP usually wrote as the good guys. 
 That also gives someone an outside perspective to one of RBP's usual plots about a the main character being in love with a woman who really doesn't deserve his devotion. As a long time reader I was sick to death of this trope of his, but it plays better him with Everett in the role of watching a friend make a mistake while doing his best to stand by him and limit the damage. It also leads to the most atypical ending that RBP did in his later years. (view spoiler)[ I was genuinely shocked that Everett willingly broke Virgil's code in order to save him from himself by killing Bragg even though Everett knew it would mean the end of their partnership. (hide spoiler)] 
 Unfortunately, RBP undermined all the interesting and different things he did in this book by immediately reverting things back to his standard baseline and themes in the next one. Which is why I never bothered reading any more of the series after that. Still, this is an entertaining western, and it also got adapted into a pretty good movie starring Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen.