Dr. David Watson, a humanities instructor at Central Carolina Community College, is author of “Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction.”

The book, Sanford native Watson’s first, is described by its publisher as examining “questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Robert Mueller, to establish an oblique history of the path from a world where not believing in truth was unthinkable to the present, where it is common to believe that objective truth is a remnant of a simpler, more naïve time.”