Kim Zupan - The Ploughmen

Rating: 5/5

Review: 
Readable and rewarding

I thought this was an excellent book. It is dark and often pretty bleak, but it is very well written and constructed. I found it involving and convincing and it left me with plenty to think about. The story is set in a small, isolated community in Montana where John Gload, an elderly serial killer, has finally been arrested and is awaiting trial. The core of the book is the conversations and relationship between Gload and Valentine Millimaki, a policeman whose marriage is disintegrating and whose job it is to guard Gload and to try to get him to reveal more about his crimes.

I admit that this may not sound the most tempting of prospects, but I found it very engrossing. Characters are exceptionally well painted, the feel of Montana is brilliantly evoked and there is a slowly building tension which sometimes made me keep reading after I should have stopped and done something else. Kim Zupan writes in rather heightened language which is generally very effective in conveying character, place and events. He does overdo it occasionally; the continual use of "atop" was a bit wearing, and having "roseous" and "griseous" within a page of each other might be thought a little OTT, for example, but such things are rare. Set against that are things like a character calmly looking at flowers while awaiting a grim fate and seeing, "…breaching the tulips, nodding trumpets of the daffodils, yellow beyond yellow in the sun." It's excellent prose put to the service of the story and I enjoyed it very much.

This is absolutely not a routine serial killer thriller. It is a dark, contemplative, thoughtful book full of the kind of moral ambiguity which leaves you thinking about all sorts of things. If you like a well-written, intelligent novel then I warmly recommend this. I found it readable and extremely rewarding.