Just when it seemed that John Berendt might turn out to be another Harper Lee - one critically acclaimed best-seller and nothing more - he returns to form with The City of Falling Angels, a beguiling tale of modern Venice, its traditions and eccentricities.

Back in 1994, Berendt sent tremors through the literary world with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, quite possibly the best nonfiction narrative since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It had everything you could want in a compelling read: mysticism, murder, University of Georgia football and a drag queen named Lady Chablis. The backdrop of Savannah was enchantingly Old World and deceptively genteel.

Angels doesn't pack quite the wallop of its sibling, but it's still a seductive tale. For one thing, Venice's rich history predates the New World by a thousand years. For another, the city's rulers included Napoleon. That gives Berendt an impossibly large canvas, which he surveys by breaking his story into delectable, easily digestible chunks.

Angels opens with a calamity: The burning of the legendary La Fenice Opera House in 1996. Was it arson? Negligence? A simple accident? Tongues wag and accusations are made in the weeks after the birthplace of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress goes up in flames.

Berendt arrived in Venice shortly after the fire, and immediately began to track its effect on the city. The investigation and the proposed rebuilding would take years, during which time he allows his story to wander down side canals and into other eras. We start and end with La Fenice, but a great deal happens in between.

We meet the Curtises, last in a line of blue-blooded Bostonians, who immigrated to Italy in the late 1800s and purchased Palazzo Barbaro along the Grand Canal. Those first Curtises were great patrons of the arts; they routinely hosted Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Robert Browning, who gave his last public reading in their palace in 1889, a month before he died. Now the Curtis descendants (including one who views the palace as a meeting point for space aliens) can't agree on how to pay for its costly upkeep and so have agreed to sell it.

We meet master glass blower Archimede Seguso, who plans to leave his legacy to the son who stuck with the business, not the son who launched a rival firm and tried to have his father declared incompetent.

We meet Massimo Donadon, who became rich inventing a better rat poison, and Mary de Rachewiltz, daughter of expatriate poet Ezra Pound and violinist Olga Rudge.

Pound and Rudge (she was his 50-year mistress) were long-time Venice residents, and after Pound's death, one sly English couple tried to swindle Pound's papers from the increasingly senile Rudge. Berendt chronicles the whole sordid affair, and how those papers came to end up at Yale as a compromise.

Then there is the matter of Save Venice, a preservation group that made friends in Venice by raising $1 million annually to restore old buildings. (Remember: rising waters have threatened the city for centuries, forcing workmen to elevate sidewalk tiles several inches every decade.) Internal feuding among the group's board members nearly caused the charity to implode.

There are masked balls and gondola rides along the various canals; there are old churches and historic squares, including the most famous, St. Mark's. Imagine Berendt's surprise one morning when he sees men catching pigeons with a net. Sure, they lure tens of thousands of tourists to the square each year, but the excrement also damages already fragile buildings.

There is human tragedy as well, specifically the "suicide" of poet Mario Stefani, whose friends cried foul when four competing wills surfaced.

The richness of detail in The City of Angels is born not just of research, but of living in the city. Berendt spent many of the 11 years since Midnight wandering Venice and getting to know the folks he chronicles. A former editor of New York magazine, he's adept at getting people to open up.

One might quibble with the exactness of conversations and quotes to which he was not privy, and save for the bookend chapters about the Fenice fire, there's not much logic to the telling of this tale. Some subjects merit two pages; others 20. And some figures introduced - Napoleon, Peggy Guggenheim - we wish he'd told us more about.

No matter. Once Falling Angels lures you in, you're hooked. Credit much of that to Berendt's deft writing. He knows how to frame a sentence, a concept and a controversy. If he weren't writing about real people and places, you'd swear you were reading a novel. Like the canals of Venice, the paragraphs flow seamlessly together.

The City of Falling Angels may not rival Midnight for odd characters (no one walks around threatening to poison the water supply), but it is very much the match in terms of creating a sense of time and place. The author makes Venice palpable and its people more than mere caricatures. From the counts and countesses dwelling in massive palazzos to a man who creates carnival masks, Berendt populates his book with unique lives.

Weaving Venice's literary and social history with its struggle for preservation and a pinch of mystery (don't forget about the fire), Berendt delivers yet another book so readable the pages almost seem to turn themselves.

Mike Pearson is features editor. pearsonm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2592.