Aaron Platt has spent every day of his life breaking his back to scrape a living from the rocky, played-out fields of the Adirondack farm he inherited from his sadistic father. One winter morning, he follows footprints in the snow to his barn and discovers a man freezing to death in a horse stall. What unfolds between the two men, past and present, is a brisk, gritty depiction of crime and punishment. But their harrowing story is more than that, exposing the shocking hypocrisy of the people who live in the nearby, bucolic town-a legacy of hatred that reaches back to the violent founding of the nation.
This literary masterpiece includes a new Afterword by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography.

A trio of vicious World War One veterans descend on the farm in the Adirondack mountains where one of them grew up and his father now lives alone. They embark on happily wreaking drunken havoc at the old man’s place and in the nearby town. But when a naïve, mail-order bride arrives, she ignites a tinderbox of resentment, lust, and betrayal among the men that explodes in brutal depravity, bloody violence, and shocking death.
This hard-boiled, literary masterpiece includes a new introduction by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography.
Previously published as The Hard Guys and filmed as the 1971 motion picture My Old Man’s Place.