Gunman's Rhapsody » (Reissue)

Featuring rapid-fire dialogue and spicy characters, Robert B. Parker's books are top-shelf reading for fans of detective crime novels. His Spenser series is several titles strong and an established classic; lately Parker has raised the stakes with two additional series (one featuring private eye Sunny Randle, the other featuring police chief Jesse Stone) that may eventually rival his beloved Boston P.I.

Robert Parker gives his fans the book he always longed to write - a brilliant and evocative novel set against the hard scrabble frontier life of the West, featuring Wyatt Earp. It is the winter of 1879, and Dodge city has lost its snap. Thirty-one-year-old Wyatt Earp, assistant city marshal, loads his wife and all they own into a wagon, and goes with two of his brothers and their women to Tombstone, Arizona, land of the silver mines. There Earp becomes deputy sheriff, meeting up with the likes of Doc Holiday, Clay Allison and Bat Masterson as well as finding the love of his life, showgirl Josie Marcus. While navigating the constantly shifting alliances of a largely lawless territory, Earp finds himself embroiled in a simmering feud with Johnny Behan, which ultimately erupts in deadly gunfire on a dusty street corner.

New York Times Book Review - Allen Barra

Parker's strengths here, as in his crime novels, are plot and dialogue. In Gunman's Rhapsody he has a terrific ready-made story in the events that led to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and its bloody aftermath of revenge, and he creates a spare Western vernacular that gets to the truth in a hurry.