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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Peter Matheson, the author most recently of

Bone by Bone, which is the capstone book of his trilogy, which began with killing Mr. Watson.

The second book was Lost Man's River, and here we are with Bone by Bone, recently published

by Random House.

Now the books have an origin in history, and when I began reading Killing Mr. Watson,

I did not know anything about E.J. Watson. What had you known when you started out?

I knew very little more than you did. I heard the name first from my father. We were traveling

up the west coast of Florida in a boat, and he showed me on the marine chart where these

rivers came down out of the Everglades

through what's called the 10,000 islands, which is really the south-west coast of Florida,

a vast, the biggest roadless area in America, a real, true wilderness.

And he said up that river three or four miles and he'd been there.

He said, there's a house.

It's the only house in the Everglades and belonged to a man named Watson and who apparently

was killed by his neighbors.

And he also knew that Watson had a very bad reputation as a killer himself.

...