One thing about the New Year is for sure, and I am celebrating it.
A new season of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch begins January 10.
The first six programs of the new season include three that feature North Carolina writers who were honored recently in Raleigh at the Bouchercon 2015 World Mystery Convention: Kathy Reichs, Sarah Shaber, and Margaret Maron. Also featured are the writer of another mystery, Ron Rash, and two authors of important non-fiction works, William Leuchtenburg and Damon Tweedy.
Charlotte author Kathy Reichs, whom Bouchercon recognized at its “American Guest of Honor,” may have been the best-known celebrity at the convention. Her 18-book Bones series and the Bones television series have brought her the fame she richly deserves. In her Bookwatch interview, taped on site at the convention, Reich talks about her latest, “Speaking in Bones.” The crime-solving anthropologist Tempe Brennan uses body parts from the North Carolina mountains to help unlock the key to a complicated murder mystery. Reichs opens the new Bookwatch series on Sunday, Jan 10, at noon with a repeat on Thursday, Jan. 14, at 5:00 p.m.
Earlier this month I wrote about Chapel Hill’s William Leuchtenburg’s “The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton.” His upcoming appearance on Bookwatch will give his North Carolina neighbors an opportunity to experience the wit and charm of the 93-year-old historian who, as one recent reviewer said, “is perhaps today’s greatest presidential historian.” (Jan. 17, 21)
Western Carolina University professor and author of the blockbuster novel “Serena,” Ron Rash talks about his latest, “Above the Waterfall.” Using the skills he has developed as a respected poet, Rash captures his beloved North Carolina mountains at their best as they provide a backdrop to a local sheriff’s effort to find out who poisoned a trout stream that runs through a vacation oriented real estate development. (Jan. 24, 28)
Raleigh mystery writer Sarah Shaber was “Local Guest of Honor” at Bouchcon’s convention. In her Bookwatch program taped at the convention, she talks about “Louise’s Chance,” her fifth in a series set in World War II Washington. Louise Pearlie, a young widow from Wilmington, works for the OSS (or Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency that was the predecessor of the CIA). From her position as a file clerk, she rises to help her agency confront the devious plots of Nazi enemies. (Jan. 31, Feb 4)
Damon Tweedy, assistant professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and staff physician at the Durham VA Medical Center, writes about his experiences as a black medical student at Duke and as a physician. In his book, “Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine,” and in his conversation on Bookwatch, he describes how he experienced a white medical world in which his race often made him an uncomfortable outsider. (Feb 7, 11)
Margaret Maron’s visit to Bookwatch is a poignant one for me. In her interview recorded at the Bouchercon convention, where she was honored for lifetime achievement, she explains that her latest “Long Upon the Land” will be the last in her 20-book Judge Deborah Knott series. The new novel is set southeast of Raleigh somewhere near the Johnston Country farm where Maron grew up. Like the other books in the series, her new book has multiple suspects. This time several men in Judge Knott’s family are suspects. Woven into the current mystery, Maron finally answers a question her fans have long asked: how did Deborah’s refined mother from one of the area’s best families marry her father, a rough and ready bootlegger? (Feb 4, 18)
Later this year there will be 20 more important authors on Bookwatch. In the meantime, these six have the new season off to a great start.
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