SOURCE: A review of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, in The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 6, March 28, 1994, p. 115.

[In the following review, the critic offers a laudatory assessment of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.]

Two stories make up [John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story]: the detailed account of a 1981 murder case involving Jim Williams, a prominent citizen of Savannah, and Danny Hansford, a young hustler who died in the study of Williams's antique-laden mansion; and a quirky travelogue devoted to the history, architecture, and citizenry of Savannah, where Berendt lived off and on during the nineteen-eighties. Although the twin narratives are not always seamlessly joined, and the prose suffers occasionally from overripeness, there is plenty of local color here to keep the reader up at night. An inscrutable voodoo practitioner, a bubba-boosting defense attorney, and...