Around these parts, the publication of a new George Dawes Green novel is an event.
Green leans all the way into Southern Gothic, but the main grotesquerie is the citys history, built on the backs of enslaved people. His prose is languid, even luxurious, but at critical moments of suspense, he pares it back to ramp up the terror.
New York Times Book Review
Savannah may appear to be some town out of a fable, with its vine flowers, turreted mansions, and ghost tours that romanticize the citys history. But look deeper and youll uncover secrets, past and present, that tell a more sinister tale. Its the story at the heart of George Dawes Greens chilling new novel, The Kingdoms of Savannah.
It begins quietly on a balmy Southern night as some locals gather at Bo Peeps, one of the towns favorite watering holes. Within an hour, however, a man will be murdered and his companion will be disappeared. An unlikely detective, Morgana Musgrove, doyenne of Savannah society, is called upon to unravel the mystery of these crimes. Morgana is an imperious, demanding, and conniving woman, whose four grown children are weary of her schemes. But one by one she inveigles them into helping with her investigation, and soon the family uncovers some terrifying truthstruths that will rock Savannahs power structure to its core.
Moving from the homeless encampments that ring the city to the stately homes of Savannahs elite, Greens novel brilliantly depicts the underbelly of a city with a dark history and the strangely mesmerizing dysfunction of a complex family.
