Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a portrait of Savannah, an isolated town in Georgia where John Berendt, a journalist from New York found himself by chance and was quickly enchanted by the cast of eccentric characters living there. With a strong architectural restoration movement and a love of old southern values, Savannah quickly struck Berendt as an island stuck in time and a delightful counterpoint to an accelerating modern America (www.roadjunky.com).

Berendt acknowledges in a foreword that many took his book to be a novel rather than a piece of travel journalism, perhaps because a natural story evolves - a murder - and the protagonists of the town all seem a little larger than life. He observes that while some writers have complained that it's rare to meet people in life who would hold the reader's interest, in Savannah's case:

It was my good fortune that the people I met and wrote about were highly original, fully-blown literary characters who were absolutely compelling without any help from me (www.bookbrowse.com).

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is that rarity of travel journalism - a work of dedication. Berendt didn't pull the usual trick of spending 2 or 3 drunk weekends in Savannah before recording as gospel the idle gossip of the maid. He rented a house and spent considerable time over several years to get to know the social and cultural scene of this eccentric Georgian town. He was evidently charmed by the place and consequently the reader, too, falls under the spell of the cocktail parties (www.roadjunky.com).

It's the eccentrics of course who capture the reader's heart; the sullen, disturbed inventor who treasures a bottle of poison powerful enough to kill the entire town; a rich bachelor who likes to disrupt the invasive film productions made outside his house by draping a Nazi banner in view of the camera; the transexual drag queen who terrifies the sensibilities of cultured society and the freeloading lawyer who holds guided tours of historic houses that he himself is squatting at the time.

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case (www.bookbrowse.com).

It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who ...