[1]: 432–437 The Transgressors opens with deputy sheriff Tom Lord riding on a Texas road with the town prostitute Joyce Lakewood.
The job turned out to be permanent as by the time his father passed away Lord felt he was too old to return to school and he uses his clownish yokel way of talking to blend in with the rest of the men in the sheriff's office.
The look on Lord's face after the accident reminds Joyce of another time he had such an intense look and she remembers a feud he had with Aaron McBride, a supervisor for the Highlands Oil and Gas company.
Lord drops Joyce off at her home and then goes directly to the court house where he confesses to his boss sheriff Bradley that he has killed McBride.
However, rather than act contrite as Bradley expects, Lord reacts with rage and abruptly quits his job as deputy.
Donna doesn't believe that her husband committed suicide and goes to various people in Highlands demanding an investigation.
This means there are now two apparent suicides of senior Highlands employees making the mobsters who Pellino reports to nervous.
As Donna sleeps Lord looks through her handbag and finds a loaded gun which he correctly assumes she purchased to kill her husband's murderer.
Eventually, after eating a meal Lord prepared for her she succumbs to her exhaustion and falls back into a natural sleep.
Meanwhile, a gunman who isn't identified finds Pellino and takes him to the tool shed for the wildcat well where McBride was killed.
Pellino realizes he can easily break down the door but he decides that is what his assailant is expecting so instead he removes the floor boards and tries to crawl underneath the shed to a spot where he could escape without being seen.
Lord realizes that the real killers are coming for him next and tries to get Donna to safety but she stubbornly refuses to leave.
He goes out to confront the killers who turn out to be Curly and Red, the two wildcat oil workers whose boss Tom killed.
Although they hated McBride, his death and the subsequent troubles with Highldands made it impossible for them to get money and as time went by they blamed Lord and developed a scheme to frame him for the murders they committed.
Donna refused to follow Lord's order to remain safe in their shack and saves his life.
The movie was to be titled Cloudburst and was about a woman in the old American west who sets out to find her husband's murderer and ends up falling in love with him.
However, Thompson still felt push back from his publishers who wanted him to continue the noir fiction style that he had cultivated in previous books rather than to tell a traditional romantic story with a happy ending.
[1]: 441–443 The character of the deputy sheriff who plays the fool but is in reality highly intelligent appeared in four of Thompson's novels.
1280, the sheriff was a sociopath who used his clowning and the fact that people assumed he was a fool as a way to manipulate others and get away with crimes including multiple murders.
Also, like the character Thompson's father put on a veneer of a friendly easy going man but underneath was highly cynical and almost misanthropic in his view of humanity.
[1]: 42 The sheriff character was also partly inspired by an experience Thompson had with an actual deputy who arrested him when he neglected to pay a fine for being drunk and disturbing the peace.