The dangers facing U.S. Border Patrol Agents while policing our frontier are brought to life in Allan Winneker's Border Line, a story of murder, kidnapping and the footprints that drug trafficking leave on the lives of those brave people locked in the battle to protect us.

As his new memoir The Death of Santini floods bookstores nationwide, we bring you a free-style, freewheeling, unabridged conversation with the man whose life has been an open book.

By Margaret Evans, Editor

If you've lived in Beaufort for any time at all, you probably have a Pat Conroy story. Maybe you played basketball together as teenagers, or he was your high school English teacher. Perhaps you were in his writers' group, or he was your neighbor on Fripp, or you still smoke cigars together on his back porch every Sunday afternoon. Maybe your association is more ephemeral – you ran into him once at Publix, or at the old Bay Street Trading Co., or in his favorite restaurant, Griffin Market. But you really connected. Or maybe you've just read his books, and you feel like you've known him forever. No matter how fast or loose the relationship, we Beaufortonians all think of Pat Conroy as ours. He belongs to us. He's part of our mythology. Heck, he wrote our mythology.

The Center for the Arts at the University of South Carolina Beaufort will present "An Evening with Pat Conroy," Saturday, Oct. 26, at 7 p.m. at the Center for the Arts on the university's Historic Beaufort Campus.