Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

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 all true. Berendt skillfully interweaves a cast of remarkable characters — a fading belle, a piano savant, a voodoo priestess, a drag queen — as he captures the beauty, the mystery, and the essential strangeness of a place unlike any other in America.