A contemporary Western with a complex and surprisingly poignant relationship at its heart.

At the centre of The Ploughmen, Kim J. Zupan's moving and (at times) violent first novel, are two men-a killer awaiting trial and a troubled young deputy-sitting across from each other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: John Gload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of seventy-one, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration, and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff's department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest, tasked with getting the killer to talk about a string of unsolved murders. With a disintegrating marriage now further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, and his safety threatened from within his own department, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a remorseless criminal. The strange intimacy of their connection takes a startling turn with a brazen act of violence, a manhunt and a stunning revelation that leaves Gload's past and Millimaki's future forever entwined.