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.

本書はサバンナという小宇宙に息づく、美しくも歪んだ魂たちの饗宴です。著者は洗練と狂気が隣り合わせで踊る南部の迷宮を、官能的な筆致で描き出しました。善悪が曖昧になる真夜中の庭という象徴は、高潔な伝統の裏に潜む人間の業を浮き彫りにし、読者を底なしの好奇心へと誘います。 強烈な磁力を放つ群像劇は、事実は小説よりも奇なりを体現しています。殺人事件から漏れ出す街の秘密を、著者は冷徹かつ情熱的な眼差しで掬い上げました。崩壊しつつある美学を愛でる背徳的な体験は、極上のミント・ジュレップのように、あなたの理性を心地よく麻痺させることでしょう。