Volume Three of the Border Trilogy In Cities of the Plain two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses & The Crossing now stand together between their vivid pasts & uncertain futures to confront a country changing beyond recognition. In the fall of 1952 John Grady Cole & Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico where one of the men is drawn again & again in this story of friendships & passion to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable. In a lovely & terrible landscape of natural beauty & impending loss we find John Grady; a young cowboy of the old school trusted by men & horses & a fragile young woman whose salvation becomes his obsession.. . Mc Carthy makes the sweeping plains a miracle Scotsman Like the Western settings he captures to perfection his work is both heart-wrenchingly beautiful & uncompromisingly brutal Express