RaveThe Miami HeraldMatthiessen deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature. But in a state generally ignorant of its past, his fiction stood in for our actual history. Naturally, we assumed the novels belonged to us … Matthiessen permeates the prose with a sense of land, wind, animals, mangroves, shellbanks and water. And his gut-wrenching descriptions of the alligator and plume hunters foretell what would happen to the Everglades … Matthiessen does murder so well, the reader can see the rage in Watson’s feral eyes. Can feel the blade of his razor drawing across the throat … Shadow Country probably works better than the original trilogy. Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel.
