Four years on The New York Times bestseller list.
Published for the first time in flipback - the new, portable, stylish format that's taken Europe by storm.
Genteel society ladies who compare notes on their husbands' suicides. A hilariously foul-mouthed black drag queen. A voodoo priestess who works her roots in the graveyard at midnight. A morose inventor who owns a bottle of poison powerful enough to kill everyone in town. A prominent antiques dealer who hangs a Nazi flag from his window to disrupt the shooting of a movie. And a redneck gigolo whose conquests describe him as a 'walking streak of sex'.
These are some of the real residents of Savannah, Georgia, a city whose eccentric mores are unerringly observed - and whose dirty linen is gleefully aired - in this utterly irresistible book. At once a true-crime murder story and a hugely entertaining and deliciously perverse travelogue, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is as bracing and intoxicating as half-a-dozen mint juleps.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
This is probably the most reductive way to start a book review, but this is simply, a very good book. In the tradition of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, this 'factional' retelling of the events surrounding the four consecutive murder trials of Georgia antiques dealer Jim Williams is a chilling Southern Gothic tale, filled with the sorts of interesting side characters and midnight hoodoo one would expect from such a story. It was a Pulitzer finalist the year it was released and to this day remains the longest running book to hold number one on the NYT bestsellers list. High praise, well deserved.
Reviewed by 42bj
QBD, 31/10/2014
