Blue-Eyed Devil

Blue-Eyed Devil, Robert B. Parker's final Western, is a little bit of a mixed bag. The fourth book featuring the team of Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, it's quite a bit better than its immediate predecessor, Brimstone, but not up to the level of either Appaloosa or Resolution.

Cole and Hitch are back in the town of Appaloosa, to find that law-keeping there is a bit different than it used to be when it was just the pair of them. Now Appaloosa has a chief of police and twelve police officers, and they don't have much need for the kind of quick-draw law the pair are best at. But an Appaloosa saloon does, since it turns out the chief is running more of a protection racket than an honest legal system, and the saloon owner hires Cole and Hitch to keep things peaceful.

In the meantime, they are joined by their friend Pony Flores, a half-Indian sometimes bandit, and Flores' half-brother, Kha-to-nay, who's wanted by the law for killing an Indian agent and by the Pinkerton Detective Agency for robbing a bank.

Pony's presence, along with Kha-to-nay's overpowering rage against the white people invading his land, bring things to a head, setting up a chain of events that will also pit Cole and Hitch against the police chief, a land baron and his hired gun. They'll return to Brimstone, a town now guarded by another pair of gunmen, to enlist reinforcements. And Allie, the shallow and vain woman Virgil Cole unreservedly and inexplicably loves, will complicate things.

It's all a rather unsorted mess, almost like two shorter stories sloppily stitched together into one much less coherent single one. Parker also seems unable to make the Allie and Virgil relationship at all believable given how completely screwed up, immature and selfish she is. One of the strengths of Resolution was Allie's absence -- not so much because of her own problems but because Parker just can't resist making her the source of trouble and then even doing a little kicking when she's down.

Parker repeats some key scenes several times, such as when Hitch notes that Virgil seems to look at nothing but sees everything. None of the different plot threads are as slipshod, lazy or unimaginative as the evil minister of Brimstone, but none of them have very clean resolutions, either -- in more than one case, the answer seems to have been pulled out of the air.

Parker's final Spenser novels, published posthumously, seemed to be the product of a man who realized that he was nearer the end of his career than the beginning and wanted to leave behind some work that showed he still had much of his storytelling gift. It's possible Blue-Eyed Devil went into the pipeline before that idea was fully formed, because it carries a very definite "coasting" vibe that diminished so much of what Parker wrote since the early-to-mid-90s.