Tuesday, January 21, 2014

2014 Selection: Killing Mister Watson

It's official -- the Key West Library's selection for the 2014 edition of One Island One Book is Killing Mister Watson by Peter Matthiessen.
This book was the first in a trilogy, which Matthiessen later reworked into a single book, Shadow Country -- which won the National Book Award.
The first book tells the story, through a series of putative oral histories, of Edgar Watson, an outlaw who lived in the Ten Thousand Islands off Florida's southwestern tip. Watson, a real person, was famously gunned down by the rest of the community in Chokoloskee in a famous incidence of mass vigilantism. No one was ever prosecuted in the killing.