(Original review http://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2008/03/...)

Take one of Parker’s Spenser novels — the newer ones, that aren’t as interesting or complex as the originals — strip it down to the frame, taking out all the tired backstory and too-oft-trod set pieces, then inject it with guns and horses and injuns and bad men and bad women and not-so-bad men, mix with heavy doses of myth and icon, then swig down in about 180 minutes of steady reading, and you have "Appaloosa".

Everett Hitch is a wandering ex-soldier in the Old West, who’s been riding with Virgil Cole for fifteen years now, moving from place to place, serving as local law enforcement for any little ramshackle cow town or mining burg that needs someone to reestablish order. The town of Appaloosa, Colorado, is no exception, with the local sheriff and one deputy having been gunned down by a band of buzzard-like hoodlums in the opening scenes, and the frightened aldermen being more than happy to pay Cole and Hitch to bring them to justice.

The story is one long series of clichéd anecdotes and events, each marching inevitably to the next, yet rendered so starkly and well that the clichés are more Campbellian myth than hackneyed plot. Men are men, women are women, thugs are thugs, whores are whores, language is colorful but terse, utterences are potentious in meaning and spare in frills, characters are complex in their simplicity, honor means everything except when it doesn’t, and it all slowly rolls downhill to its inevitable conclusion of blood and betrayal in the final scene.

As I said, this is not a long book — 276 pages, but widely space and largely typed, and I finished it pretty much in two lunch hours. I got the hardcover off the remainders shelf at Barnes & Noble, so I paid less than the paperback runs for. It was an entertaining read, a lean and sun-bleached Western, and a demonstration that formula can make a good read and even keep you guessing when it counts.