Charles Markee & Waights Taylor This month’s Word By Word guests have written novels set in distinctive times and places. As he did in his first detective novel, Kiss of Salvation, Waights Taylor takes us back to 1948 in the segregated Birmingham, Alabama worlds of detective partners Joe McGrath and Sam Rucker in Touch of Redemption, while Charles Markee’s novel of magical realism, Maria’s Beads, features a Latino lettuce-packing family living in present-day Salinas, California. Host Gil Mansergh tells us that after the show was recorded, Maria’s Beads won the silver medal for Junior Fiction in the prestigious Colorado Independent Publishers Association 22nd annual competition.