Review of "Robert B. Parker’s The Bridge," by Robert Knott

Review of

Robert B. Parker’s The Bridge, by Robert Knott ISBN 9780399171130


Five out of five stars

 Territorial Marshals Virgil Cole and Everett Hicks are living in Appaloosa and they are fairly settled. There is the routine crime that they and their deputies have been dealing with, but nothing major. That changes in a dramatic way, starting with a man with a gun chasing some men down the street until Everett intervenes.

 Things literally and figuratively explode when a major bridge under construction is blown up in a clearly professional job. There are several obvious winners and losers as a consequence, but it is clear to Cole and Hutch that it is the non-obvious winners and losers that likely matter more. Their investigation takes them on long journeys in horrible winter weather and of course they face potential mortal danger.

 Knott holds very true to the Parker tactic of keeping minimal word usage by Cole and Hicks. There are a lot of one- or two-word utterances. There is a great deal of personal interaction between Colt’s female companion Allie and the two marshals, making this a personable novel. The requisite gunplay is also present, for their adversaries are brutal and sadistic, even to their allies.

 Knott does an excellent job in keeping to the Parker mode in this book. I am not sure that if I was given a random segment of the book that I could identify it as written by Knott.