[In the following review, Whitley discusses Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil as a unique combination of true-crime story and travel book.]

The voodoo priestess looked across the table at her wealthy client, a man on trial for murder: "Now, you know how dead time works. Dead time lasts for one hour—from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin' good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin' evil…. Seems like we need a little of both tonight."

When he began living part of the year in Savannah, Ga., John Berendt, a columnist for Esquire and a former editor of New York magazine, was looking for—what? Respite from the big city? A charming little Southern town dripping with humidity and history to observe as fodder for a novel? What he found was a cultured but isolated back-water, a town where who your great-grandparents were still matters, where anti-Yankee resentments are never far from the surface and where writers from New York are invited to midnight voodoo ceremonies in graveyards.

The book he has written based on his eight years of living part-time in Savannah is a peculiar combination of true crime and travelogue. The first half of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is about the people Mr. Berendt encountered: Joe Odom, a ne'er-do-well lawyer, piano player and tour guide, who drags antiques and an entourage of eccentrics to reside in one historic house after another from eviction to eviction; the Lady Chablis, a radiant black drag queen who uses the author as a convenient chauffeur to drive her home after her hormone shots; Serena Dawes, whom Cecil Beaton once called "one of the most perfect natural beauties I've ever photographed," now in middle age and given to boas, chiffon and dark green nail polish. And there's her lover, Luther Driggers, an inventor who discovered that a certain pesticide could pass through plastic, making flea collars and no-pest strips possible. After failing to capitalize on his find, he has become a town character who "walks" flies by gluing threads to their backs, and keeps the people of Savannah tense with threats to poison the water supply.

The second half of the book is the story of Jim Williams, a rich antiques dealer and restorer of Mercer House, one of the city's most beautiful historic homes and the site of the Christmas party Savannah's social elite "lived for." Six months after Mr. Berendt arrived, Williams was charged in the 1981 shooting of Danny Hansford, a tempestuous young man known as "a walking streak of sex" to both men and women in town.

Williams, Hansford's employer and sometime lover, pleaded self-defense. The evidence was far from clear-cut. It appeared that Williams may have staged the shooting, moving crucial pieces of evidence to make it look as if he fired his gun only after Hansford tried to kill him. Convicted, he quickly won a new trial when evidence of prosecutorial misconduct was sent anonymously to his attorney.

Before his second trial, besides engaging expensive criminal lawyers to represent him in the courtroom, Williams hired Minerva, the voodoo priestess, to put a curse on the prosecutor. Mr. Berendt makes it clear where Williams thought the better value for the dollar was.

Despite Minerva's ministrations, the second trial also ended in conviction. While Jim Williams ran his antiques business and wrote letters to Architectural Digest from jail, his lawyers managed to persuade the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn the verdict and order yet another trial. Again Minerva went to work, throwing graveyard dirt on the steps of Williams's enemies' homes. After the third trial ended in a mistrial, Williams was retried yet again and became the only person in Georgia history ever tried for the same murder four times. Seven months after finally being acquitted, Williams died, in January 1990.

Mr. Berendt's writing is elegant and wickedly funny, and his eye for telling details is superb. In recounting the tale of Williams's trials, he frequently veers off and includes overheard conversations, funny vignettes and bits of historical and architectural data—a method that a lesser observer might have botched but that works wonderfully here. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to call a travel agent and book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.