The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan

Two men who have very little in common are thrown together by crime and punishment in the Montana penal system. Valentine Milimaki is a young Copper County sheriff assigned to guard psychopathic serial killer, John Gload, an old man finally caught after years of criminal activity.  They are able to make a connection despite their very great differences. Both grew up essentially motherless on hardscrabble Montana farms. Both love their wives but have trouble with their relationships. And neither one can sleep. Gload was a ruthless killer who robbed and mutilated his victims to cover up his crimes. He had been a careful killer, so although he began his life of crime as a young teen, he was not caught until he reached his seventies. After Gload’s arrest, Milimaki must sit guard outside of Gload’s cell, listening to him chain smoke and talk about his past, all the while worrying about his wife, who seems about to leave him. Other deputies try to interfere with their odd relationship, believing the deputy to be too soft to handle a killer. They don’t realize that Gload can still be just as dangerous in prison as he was out of it.   In The Ploughmen, Kim Zupan has written, in a spare style, a thriller and an evocative description of Montana’s landscape as well as its rural inhabitants.

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

The rural Montana depicted in Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson is a rough, hard-scrabble place and not an easy place to be a social worker. Pete Snow is a Montana social worker based in the small town of Tenmile. He is a decent man who has too much empathy for his own good. He often takes chances and breaks rules to keep dysfunctional families together, knowing that a foster home or institution might be a more damaging, dangerous place for children than a home headed by a drug-addicted parent. So when a young boy from a survivalist family wanders into town from the mountains, Pete buys him some clothes, food and medicine and escorts him back into the wilderness. There he meets the boy’s father, Jeremiah Pearl. Over time, Pete befriends Jeremiah and his son, Benjamin. He learns that Benjamin is just one child in a large family but, mysteriously, he never encounters any of the others. At the same time, Pete must continue to tend to the needs of his other difficult clients. Further, when his own family, having its own problems, disintegrates, he loses his wife and daughter.

Fourth of July Creek is set in the very early 1980’s after President Reagan is shot, the Pearls and other survivalists come under closer scrutiny by agents of the Federal Government. Mistrust and ignorance on both sides complicate matters and violence erupts in town and in the mountains. Pete Snow is a man caught in the middle—a government agent who has compassion for those with anti-government inclinations. Fanaticism and violence can only end in tragedy even though a good man, Pete Snow, does his futile best to prevent it.