Cole and Hitch

About the Cole and Hitch series

Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch are a pair of hired lawmen drifting across the post-Civil War American West, taking on marshal and deputy jobs in whichever town needs order imposed fastest. Robert B. Parker's only western series, it applies the same spare, dialogue-driven style he brought to Spenser to the genre that shaped his prose in the first place — Cole is the quicker gun and the more rigid moral code, narrator Everett Hitch the steadier, more reflective of the two, and their partnership is tested repeatedly by women, politics, and the plain fact that imposing law on a lawless town usually means killing people. Parker wrote four novels between 2005 and his death in 2010; the first, Appaloosa, was adapted into a well-regarded 2008 film starring Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen, with Robert Knott co-writing the screenplay.

That connection led directly to the series' continuation: Knott, having spent years inside Cole and Hitch's voice for the film, was chosen by the Parker estate to keep writing the characters, and has added six further novels since 2013 under the same Robert B. Parker's-branded model used for Spenser, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall. This is the series for readers who like Parker's terse, morally unambiguous style but want gunfights and frontier towns instead of modern Boston.

How to read this series

Publication order runs straight through both authors. Start with Appaloosa (2005), which introduces Cole and Hitch taking the marshal job in the title town and establishes the pattern the whole series follows: a lawless settlement, a dangerous local power broker, and the two men imposing order through a mix of negotiation and gunplay. Parker's four originals run through Blue-Eyed Devil (2010); Robert Knott picks up directly afterward with Ironhorse (2013) and has continued with five more novels through Buckskin (2019), with a further entry announced. Each book's central conflict is largely self-contained, but Cole and Hitch's partnership and reputation carry forward, so publication order is still the natural way through.