Good. Not as good as Robert Parker but a worthy successor. ( )

Children's books are written for beginning readers and they include devices such as citing who is speaking for each comment. Authors expect adult readers to keep up with the give and take of conversation and only attribute a comment if the reader might be confused about who is speaking. When it wore on my last nerve, I had my Kindle search how many times the author typed and I read "Virgil said". My Kindle stopped counting at 500. "Enough, already," Jonquil said. ( )

Parker’s dialogues were spare. That’s what I particularly enjoy about his writing. In Ironhorse, Knott did a fair job continuing the saga of Virgil and Everett. In this novel, I found the dialogue painful, stilted, and unnatural.

The Mexican continually referring to himself in the third person became increasingly irritating; although, I did like his character.

One point in Knott’s favor: Virgil hasn’t gone running back to Addy or Maddy or whatever her name was. How a guy like Virgil could get tangled up with someone as pathetic, self-centered, and weak as she is simply escapes me. ( )

Knott decided that he does not need any of the secondary characters and moved the novel outside of Appaloosa and sends Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch to chase a man who had been accused of murder. That should have been the end of the story but the day when that happened, the president of the local bank robbed the bank. And who has information about the whole mess? The same guy they just brought to jail.

So Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, together with their prisoner, are off to Mexico chasing the money and the story behind that bizarre robbery. Long train rides, Mexican police which is anything but honest, old secrets and a slow revealing of what really happened fill the rest of the novel.

I did not hate the story. But it felt almost like a pastiche of a Cole and Hitch novel. I don't expect Knott to be the same as Parker and changing the style is almost normal but if he had changed the names of the two main character, it would have been an average western with lawmen who you had never read about. But on top of that there is an attempt to connect them to the known Cole and Hitch - and it really became a pastiche.

I hate dropping series and I may decide to continue with this one - the stories are not that bad since Knott took over but they are drifting more and more from why I liked the initial books in the series. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed all of Robert B. Parker's entries in this series of Westerns featuring friends Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. I normally have a strict rule about not reading series continuations written by other authors, but I was missing the characters and decided to give Robert Knott's entry a try. And I don't regret it, exactly, but it simply isn't Parker and was thus fell short for me. I'd like to read some of Knott's other books, as I think I'd enjoy his writing if I wasn't feeling compelled to compare it to one of my favorite authors. If you love and desperately miss Virgil and Hitch, you could do worse than pick this one up. No, it's not Parker, but it's far from terrible.