Resolution

RESOLUTION picks up where Parker’s 2005 western APPALOOSA left off. After a bloody confrontation in that town, Everett Hitch, former West Point cadet, soldier and occasional lawman, arrives in Resolution and soon finds employment as a bouncer/peacekeeper in the Blackfoot Saloon. It is a challenging job since Resolution is so new that they don’t have a sheriff or any law to speak of. His new boss warns him that he has had difficulty keeping a saloon “lookout” in the past.

Sure enough, trouble soon arrives and Hitch kills the hired gun of the mining camp up the hill. And he starts giving shelter in the saloon to abused whores. He confesses to being “softhearted” for them, much to the chagrin of his boss, who is waging his own personal struggle for supremacy over the town against both the owner of the mine and the ranchers, or “sodbusters,” homesteading down the hill. With more trouble on the horizon, Hitch is happy when his old friend from Appaloosa, ex-lawman Virgil Cole, rides into town. Hitch describes his friend:

“She stared at him. I knew she did not understand him. Most people didn’t. There was about him a flat deadliness that frightened people.”