Book Review: The Ploughmen

The Ploughmen is a novel about two men — a killer awaiting trial for a brutal murder and a young sheriff’s deputy. The deputy works the over-night shift and is assigned to sit outside the killer’s cell night after night in the hope of extracting information of additional crimes in the old man’s long career. What begins as small talk deepens into shared confidences and ends with an interesting twist in which the killer puts the deputy into an untenable position. Along with this twist comes one last confession of several murders.