Pun Salad

This new-in-paperback Robert B. Parker western hit the threshhold last week, and on the top of the To-Be-Read pile it went. I noticed that the publishers put a "Great Read Guaranteed" sticker on this; you can send it back to them for a refund, if you're feeling churlish. I'm keeping mine.

It's a sequel to Appaloosa. (I previously blogged about both the book and the movie.) The heroes, Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole, split up at the end of that book, after Hitch decided he needed to go outside the law to rescue Cole's relationship with the perennially-unfaithful Allie French.

So Hitch moves on to the law-free town of Resolution, and is hired as a peacekeeper by local saloon magnate Amos Wolfson. It's not a bad gig, although he occasionally feels the need to contend with Wolfson over the decent treatment of his sex workers, which he calls, refreshingly, whores.

Things get complicated by Wolfson's irrational need to run the entire town, which requires elimination of his competition. And Virgil shows up, having been abandoned by his beloved Allie. What transpires is a lot of shooting, and Parker's usual meditations on male/male friendship and the ethical codes of people who make their living via violence mostly on the il- side of legal.

All in all, a good read, and I don't usually read westerns. In between violent episodes, Hitch and Cole discuss the political philosophies of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and try to fit them to their situation. I didn't notice them discussing Thomas Hobbes, probably even more appropriate for his observation of anarchistic life as being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"; certainly there's quite a bit of that here. I found myself wondering if there might be a political science professor, somewhere, who might assign this book as secondary reading.