One day, the cows stopped grazing north. A few days later, some of them disappeared as if they had never been. The owner of the slaughterhouse is missing, and a group of workers – a cattle driver who looks the cows in the eye, a former moose butcher who is fed up with the snow, and a half-crazy Indian who has been turned savage by civilization – set out to investigate what initially appears to be theft and turns out to be a mystery that undermines the boundary between human and animal. Edgar Wilson, the book’s protagonist, is the first to alert us that something has gone wrong. His job is to give the animals a stroke of grace that will take their consciousness away before slaughter, and he takes care to prevent them from suffering unnecessarily. Before the stroke, he entrusts their souls to God and looks into their eyes – but you can’t see anything in a bull’s eyes, he says. In extraordinary prose, “Of Cows and Men” manages to shake not through graphic descriptions of horror but through literature itself, in dry, direct, dirty, unpsychological, and unequivocal language. It can be read as a social critique that reveals the brutality that exists at all levels of human society, a society that denies violent people who are merely a link in the chain of production of the food products it consumes every day. But it can also be read as a particularly unpredictable thriller, in which anything can happen – because in Ana Paula Maia's novel, like the world in which it takes place, there are no rules.