At the centre of THE PLOUGHMEN, 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 71, 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. The strange intimacy of their connection soon takes a startling turn.