Savannah may appear to be “some town out of a fable,” with its vine flowers, turreted mansions, and ghost tours that romanticize the city’s history. But look deeper and you’ll uncover secrets, past and present, that tell a more sinister tale. It’s the story at the heart of George Dawes Green’s chilling new novel, The Kingdoms of Savannah.

It begins quietly on a balmy Southern night as some locals gather at Bo Peep’s, one of the town’s 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 truths—truths that will rock Savannah’s power structure to its core.

Moving from the homeless encampments that ring the city to the stately homes of Savannah’s elite, Green’s novel brilliantly depicts the underbelly of a city with a dark history and the strangely mesmerizing dysfunction of a complex family.

Review:

Haunting, complex, and intense!

The Kingdoms of Savannah is a charged, gripping mystery that sweeps you away to Savannah, Georgia, and into the lives of the prominent, dysfunctional Musgrove family as they reluctantly, at the persistence of their matriarch Morgana, band together to solve the callous murder of a young homeless man and the disappearance of a middle-aged woman who seems to have discovered some long-buried secrets that at least one person is willing to kill to keep hidden in the past.

The prose is powerful and polished. The characters are flawed, ruthless, and self-absorbed. And the plot is a captivating, menacing mix of life, loss, secrets, deception, privilege, resentments, greed, corruption, homelessness, familial drama, and harrowing truths.

Overall, I found The Kingdoms of Savannah to be a gritty, provocative, tight novel by Green that’s a must read for anyone who loves a well-written mystery interlaced with a dramatic, family saga all mired in the dark, racially toxic history of the south.

This novel is available on July 19, 2022.

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