Taking a break from his popular Spenser series, Robert B. Parker exchanges the streets of present-day Boston for the dusty trails of a 19th-century mining town in this hard-bitten tale of the Wild West. Virgil Cole is the new marshal in Appaloosa, and he and his deputy, Everett Hitch, are tasked with dealing out justice to rancher Randall Bragg, a notorious thief of both supplies and women who is responsible for the shooting deaths of the town's previous lawmen.