Killing Mr. Watson

by Peter Matthiessen

Paperback

Published August 1, 1990

About the author

Peter Matthiessen is the author of more than thirty books and the only writer to win the National Book Award for both non-fiction (The Snow Leopard, in two categories, in 1979 and 1980) and fiction (Shadow Country, in 2008). A co-founder of The Paris Review and a world-renowned naturalist, explorer and activist, he died in April 2014.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slowly unfolding but well paced story, inspired by real individuals, incidents and places.
If you've read "A Land Remembered" you'll enjoy this one as it dives deep into late 1800s/early 1900s southwest Florida, along the Gulf and just west of the Everglades. A land of frontiers and frontiersmen doing their best to tame a hostile land and to live with each other.

[Kathie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sorry tale of vigilante justice set out as a series of accounts by a varied array of witnesses, law officers, drifters, and bystanders. It's an absorbing glimpse into Florida history at the turn of the 20th century, when the Gulf Coast was a still a warren of sparsely settled inlets and islands. Law enforcement was spotty at best, life was cheap, and the virtually uninhabited swamps were good places for a man to choose to get lost. The language bristles with all the ignorance and racism of the time, an effective snapshot of that era's culture. I'm not a fan of racist language, but it all sounds very true to the era and surroundings.

[Julie Reiter · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no idea how this book could be listed on must read lists because I could barely make it through it. I’m definitely not going to read the whole trilogy. The sad thing is that this could be a great historical fiction if it was written in a way that it wasn’t so hard to understand that it became incredibly boring. I may look for either a true crime book or another historical fiction about the Florida Everglades frontiersman and murderer Ed Watson that’s written by someone else because it could be an interesting story.