The book opens with Watson's death - his shooting by a local posse on the shores of Chokoloskee Island behind the Ted Smallwood Store.

The rest of the book pieces together first-person accounts of 12 characters who recount the story from Watson's arrival in the Ten Thousand Islands in the early 1890s until his demise in 1910.

It is set several years after Book One, and it tells the story of Lucius, one of Watson's sons and an alcoholic historian, who tries to reconstruct his father's life in an attempt to determine whether he was really a murderer and an outlaw.

In this first-person section, Edgar Watson tells his own life story, from his childhood in South Carolina to his fatal encounter with his neighbors on the edge of the Florida Everglades.

Michael Dirda was one of many critics who lavished praise on the work: Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a "Great American Novel," as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.

This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

[3]Tom LeClair, reviewing the work for the New York Times, considered that the work failed to live up to the sum total of its originally published parts, stating: By reducing his Watson materials to one volume, Matthiessen has sacrificed qualities that gave those novels their powerful reinforcing illusions of authenticity and artlessness.