midnight in the garden of good and evil paperback

The book, Berendt's first, was published in 1994 and follows the story of an antiques dealer on trial for the murder of a male prostitute. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a non-fiction novel by John Berendt. A book on the interiors of the world's great houses featured it alongside Sagamore Hill, Biltmore, and Chartwell.

Architectural Digest had devoted six pages to it.

If Mercer House was not quite the biggest private house in Savannah, it was certainly the most grandly furnished. Together with the walled garden and the carriage house in back, it occupied an entire city block. It was Mercer House, one of the last of Savannah's great houses still in private hands. There was a ballroom on the second floor. A graceful spiral stairway rose from the center hall toward a domed skylight. It was a mansion, really, with fifteen-foot ceilings and large, well-proportioned rooms. We were sitting in the living room of his Victorian house. He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning sliver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine - he could see out, but you couldn't see in. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city has become a modern classic. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else. 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 is the 'soul of pampered self-absorption' the uproariously funny black drag queen the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. 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. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction.

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. Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981.

Midnight in the garden of good and evil paperback