Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt is a weird story about even weirder people! I would be gone from that town soooo fast. What creepy people! With the strange people you knew the murder mystery would be just as creepy, but not good. Easy to figure out that Jim and Danny were lovers right away. Why hide it in this town? You have a man that only puts make up on one eye, a man who walks an invisible dog, a man that hordes enough poison so he can at sometime kill everyone, and a transvestite dating a man. These are the sane people! I wasn't impressed with the writing, the plot, or the mystery. His weird characters were weird but that was it. Not my kind of book.

I love non-fiction that reads like a novel, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did just that. This is the second time I've read it, and the first time listening on audio. Loved the performance by Jeff Woodman!

Wow, that was really interesting. It can take a bit to get into because the entire first part is all just about introducing the characters. But once the murder happens, the story really picked up. It got kind of annoying toward the end with the 15 retrials [OK, 4 retrials:] because I just wanted to know what happened in the end. But I just loved it.

This was a decent book. There was a lot of mood, of which I'm a big fan. The characters all had the potential to be very interesting, but unfortuately, they weren't developed. That's not to say you don't spend a lot of time with them, or find out anything about them, it's just that you don't really give a damn.

The book is written by a magazine journalist who ends up living on and off in Savanah, GA for eight years to investigate and chronicle a murder and it's trials. This book is more or less one long magazine article, detailng the events, and lives, but never really giving you sympathy for any of the characters.

It does a fine job of keeping the mystery of whether Jim Williams really did the deed a secret, but in comparison to In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (which I'm reading currently) this is not worth the effort.

I picked this up on a whim from the true crime shelf at my local bookstore because the title caught my attention and I’m SO glad I did. Now this definitely isn’t your typical true crime novel and I kind of loved it. There was a murder and a court case that we got to dive into but that felt secondary to the real guts of the story, the city itself and its over the top wild residents. Normally I’d be annoyed at something like that but here it just worked so well because the characters were just so damn fascinating! We’ve got a HILARIOUS Black drag queen that I just lived for, a voodoo priestess, a redneck escort, a recluse with a bottle of poison that could kill the whole town and so many more interesting people that it’s hard to believe that they’re all actually REAL LIVE people. That’s what the real story was here for me, these wild and hilarious characters! Sure the murder case was interesting but it’s the people that made me love this book, not the murder. My only minor complaint is that some parts did drag on a bit and could have been cut short to make it really perfect. But I loved it anyways and highly recommend it if you’re looking for a true crime novel that’s a bit outside of the box.

I got rather surprised when I read reviews after finishing this and realized it was a non fiction. Definitely did not feel like that, was a lot more like a novel. But that didn't mean that it wasn't good. It was very good, and I quite liked getting that surprised for some reason.

I love when in a true crime book everything outside the crime is so good that I stop caring about the murder. It takes some amazing writing to make you feel that there is something more interesting than an actual homicide.

Here the murder does not happen till the middle of the book. First part focuses on introducing you to Savannah, it's history and people living there. It feels like you are taking an afternoon stroll in the middle of the hot summer and author introduces you to the people you meet. The atmosphere is impeccable and all the people you are meeting are full-bloodied characters. John Berendt describes everyone with great kindness making them very likable - doesn't matter if it's an arrogant antique dealer, young man with anger issues or a drag queen with a penchant for theatrics. Prepare yourself for some juicy high-society gossip and drama, incredible life stories and some bizarre aspects of living in Georgia. I was gobbling this book up.

And then, on the last page - a betrayal. Author admits in the Author's Note that some of the events were a bit dramatized. I hate when that happens in a non-fiction book because in my opinion its not a non-fiction anymore, it's a novel inspired by the true events. I started digging a bit into what is true and what is not but I stopped when I discovered that Serena Dawes was a completely made up character and all author's interactions with her were fictional. The disappointment was just. too. big.

I've still enjoyed it.

“He could be some fella from New York who decided to write a book about us and started filling it with drag queens and murderers and corpses and bottles of poison and--what’s that you were telling me about just a minute ago? Oh, yeah, voodoo! Voodoo! Witchcraft in a graveyard! Damn!”

In 1981, John Berendt found himself in Savannah, Georgia. Enchanted by the place and its eccentric inhabitants, he stayed on, living there part-time for the next eight years, and brought us back this murder mystery/travelogue with a fiction-like plot and exposé-style writing.

The thread that holds the story together involves a murder, but at heart it’s all about place and people: Savannah and the depth and breadth of its distinctive residents. This was fantastic in parts, but the middle was hard for me to get through, I think because of Berendt’s hybrid fiction/non-fiction approach. I wanted the point-of-view and character depth you get with fiction, or maybe an actual exposé that wasn’t as long.

But I have high praise for a number of aspects. The voodoo was fascinating, I was completely charmed by The Lady Chablis (who made only a few appearances, much to my disappointment), and the writing was often superb. For example, two scenes with Chablis had me laughing hysterically, due to absolute perfect timing. One, when her birth name was revealed, and the other at the Debutant Ball when she shared how someone could acquire a gorgeous gown like the one she was wearing. “She’ll have to get all this shit the way I did … shoplifting.”  Ba-dum ching! The landing of those lines could not have been better, and while Chablis had a lot to do with it I’m sure, this still had to be written, and it was written perfectly.

So an enjoyable read, especially for the memorable characters and the distinctive setting of Savannah. But it would have been just a run-of-the mill murder story without the terrific title, the haunting cover, and of course, the Grand Empress herself. Just saying.

Though this is a work of nonfiction, I have taken certain storytelling liberties …
(The Author’s Note)

That was different. I’m not sure I have read a book like this before.

There is a wild assortment of characters similar to a Dickens novel introduced in the first half of this book. In the second half of the book, after the “incident” the story takes on aspects of a John Grisham legal thriller. In between there are various sections describing the architecture, renewal, and historic preservation of Savannah similar to an article in the Sunday New York Times travel section. These sections were rather dull and boring, and the story bogged down for me.

The book had a difficult time keeping up the tempo. In the first half I started losing interest in the various characters being introduced. Throughout this book the city of Savannah is one of the reoccurring characters. Initially I thought this might be an interesting place to visit, as I am sure it is, but by the end I had no intention of entertaining that idea any longer.

In the second half the trial was interesting at first, although lacking the drama of a Grisham book, but it also lost my interest as it dragged on.

Many readers will enjoy some of the characters in this book. Although it is hard to believe that such characters actually exist, Chablis (she dominates every scene she is in), Joe Odom (who doesn’t like the piano player), and Minerva (I don’t want to cross her) were the highlights for me.

I first read this book some 15 years ago, after being lent it by a friend.

I now have my own copy. It is a book I go to every few years for a visit. And I must be due for another visit sometime soon.

So this has been on my TBR pile for many years. I am glad I read it and enjoyed the read, but not like I thought I would. Parts of the book seemed unnecessary and disrupted the flow of the story. The writing was well done and I like that the author lived and mingled with the people of Savannah before, during and after the murder trial. I think that gave the book a deeper resonance and flavor than if he had just researched the trial and the people involved. This was unlike any true crime book I have ever read. In some cases it didn't even feel like a crime book, but almost like a good novel. I will say that Savannah is now a place I would like to visit based on the way he wrote about it. You can tell he loved the city. It definitely is worth the read and I'm glad I finally read it.

The writing was great, the story was led into in an interesting way, but the trial was trivial and so were many characters that were introduced in the first half of the book. But, I liked reading about them anyway and, while the book came together well in the end, the whole thing wasn’t cohesive. That said, I feel like I should have more good things to say about a book I enjoyed reading so much.