Maybe it's the luddite in me, but my favourite digital projects are those that cleverly fuse the old and the new. Nunslinger, a serial western by the pseudonymous Stark Holborn, is a brilliant example.

Published in ebook instalments every few months until its paperback release later this year, it relates the adventures of a nun who innocently embarks on the overland trail to California, only to end up on the run, wanted for a crime she didn't commit.

While true in spirit to the original dime westerns, the no-nonsense Sister Thomas Josephine, who knows how to wield a pistol (or two), is as far away from a 19th-century damsel in distress as you can get. Imagine a more mature and likable version of the heroine in Charles Portis's True Grit, which also, funnily enough, began life as a serial. Holborn, whoever he (or she, but I think it's probably a he)is, admits to trying to "scratch the surface of a genre long given over to stereotypes". Somehow I don't think Sister Thomas Josephine will turn out to be a prostitute in disguise.

Witty and atmospheric, with a cliffhanger every few chapters, Nunslinger is thrilling stuff, even if – as I used to think – westerns aren't really your thing. I galloped through the omnibus edition in one bumpy sitting. The plot's urgency and tension must owe something to the writing process. I had wondered if the serial publication was merely a way of marketing a finished novel, but no, Nunslinger is being written as we read it, with each instalment turned around in record time by its editors at Hodder. I'm determined to discover the identity of the supremely talented Stark Holborn before parts 7-9 are published in June.