The Ploughmen

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.