Summary
The next gritty, gun-slinging entry in the New York Times -bestselling series, featuring itinerant lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch.
Territorial Marshals Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch are back in Appaloosa, where their work enforcing the law has been exceptionally quiet. All that is about to change. An ominous storm rolls in, and along with it a band of night riders with a devious scheme, who show up at the Rio Blanco camp, where a three-hundred-foot bridge is under construction.
Appaloosa's Sheriff Sledge Driskill and his deputies are the first to respond, but as the storm grows more threatening, news of troubles at the bridge escalate and the Sheriff and his deputies go missing.
Virgil and Everett saddle up to sort things out but before they do the hard drinking, Beauregard Beauchamp arrives in Appaloosa with his Theatrical Extravaganza troupe and the promise of the best in lively entertainment west of the Mississippi. With the troupe comes a lovely and mysterious fortune-teller who is set on saving Everett from imminent but indefinable danger.
The trouble at the bridge, the missing lawmen, the new arrivals, and Everett's shoot-out in front of Hal's Cafe aren't the only things on Cole and Hitch's plate as a gang of unsavory soldiers ease into town with a shady alibi, shadier intentions, and a soon-to-be-discovered wake of destruction.
As clouds over Appaloosa continue to gather, things get much worse for Cole and Hitch...
Robert Brown Parker is an American fiction writer of mysteries. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and earned his BA degree from Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He went on to earn his master's degree in English literature from Boston University. He started his career working in advertising. After some years, he went back to school to earn his PhD in English from Boston University in 1971. He then began his writng career while teaching at Northeastern University. He decided to become a full-time writer in 1979. His most popular works were the 40 novels written about the private detective Spenser. The ABC Television Network developed the television series "Spenser: For Hire", based on the character in the mid-1980s. Parker also wrote nine novels based on the character Jesse Stone and six novels based on the character Sunny Randall.
On January 18, 2010, Robert Parker died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge Massachusetts.
(Bowker Author Biography)