I love a good historic house and an excellent historic town, so one star was already awarded for a banger of a setting and the discussion of Savannah's Historic Preservation movement. I studied Historic Preservation in college, and if there was anything I remembered other than my love for flemish bond brick styles, it was the politics and gossip involved in preservation. This book showed that incredibly well.

After visiting Savannah years ago, this book has been sitting on my shelf, taunting me. One of my reading challenges this year is to pick up some of those taunting books and finally read them. My initial thoughts for Part One have to do with the amount of time the author takes to explain the multi-dimensional array of people that live in Savannah. Coming from a small town myself, it was interesting to see an outsider's perspective on a small, tight-knit community. By the time I reached the end of the first section, I had completely forgotten that this was a murder mystery, not just general fiction. At first, I was surprised that it took that long to get to the murder, but after thinking about it, I think that was the whole point. Bury the reader in all this detail of the individual characters and their stories, and then when you've got them trapped, you hit them with the murder. While I did find the book a bit hard to get through based on the language and detail used in the story, I did enjoy it. The last few pages take you for a spin until you get to the very last paragraph, which leaves you with the understanding that it was all worth it.