See Hart and Harvey again on ‘Bookwatch’

Published 12:00 am Sunday, June 11, 2017

Here’s your chance to see them again. In recognition of their nominations for the Southern Book Award, John Hart’s and Kristy Woodson Harvey’s episodes of “North Carolina Bookwatch” will be rebroadcast.

Hart talks about “Redemption Road” on Thursday at 5 p.m. “Bookwatch’s” Sunday airing will be preempted for special programming.

Harvey will follow on June 18 at noon and June 22 at 5 p.m.

Hart’s most recent book  drew praise from fellow author David Baldacci, who said the book’s “prologue is heart-wrenching and the chapters thereafter pull you in like matter to a black hole.”

“Redemption Road” delivers a complex plot with more than 30 important and complicated characters. None are more important or more complicated than the central character, Detective Elizabeth Black, herself an accused murderer, who is determined to find justice for Adrian Wall, a wrongly, she thinks, convicted murderer of an attractive young mother. Her search for the real killer is the story line that holds Hart’s complex set of plots together.

Hart’s stories are based on characters rather than complicated plots charted in advance. “For me,” he said, “the books always begin with an idea of who the main character is. … Before I know the plot, I always see the character first.”

Harvey, like fellow finalist Hart, grew up in Salisbury. She now lives in the historic town of Beaufort.

Less than a year after the publication of “Dear Carolina,” her successful debut, her second, “Lies and Other Acts of Love,” drew favorable attention and became a finalist for the Southern Book Prizes.

It is a heart-rending account of four generations of an Eastern North Carolina family in transition. The two leading characters who tell the story are Lynn “Lovey” White, a grandmother whose husband is fading away after 60 years of marriage, and her granddaughter, Annabelle, who has changing ideas about who and what she wants in a husband. Harvey’s book will entertain, challenge, and surprise its readers.

With her third novel, “Slightly South of Simple,” gaining acclaim after its spring release, Harvey proves she is a prolific force among Southern writers.

Both Hart and Harvey have been featured in issues of Salisbury the Magazine, available at the Salisbury Post.