Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
by David Grann
Recommended Ages: 14+

My birthday was this past Saturday, but it didn't get celebrated much on the day itself - mostly because both of my parents had their 50th high school reunion that day. Nevertheless, my mom and her husband took me out for barbecued ribs the day before, and my dad and stepmom had me over for a delicious home-cooked meal a few days later, and I'm too old for cake and balloons, so it's all right. When both of my parents asked me what I did on my birthday, my answer was: I went out for shrimp egg foo young and splurged on myself at the local bookstore. This book was one of my birthday presents to myself, and I devoured it hungrily in spite of the weight of three Chinese omelets with gravy in my stomach.

This non-fiction book generates the kind of atmosphere of suffocating dread and tension that would do credit to a novel of mystery and suspense. It follows the investigation and prosecution, involving an early team of FBI special agents led by a former Texas Ranger named Tom White, of some of the key figures in a widespread conspiracy that was killing off the wealthy Osage Indians in an oil-rich area of Oklahoma in the early 1920s. Members of this well-to-do community were dying at a rate well above the national average, in spite of their high standard of living; meantime, the government did not allow them to handle their own affairs as they saw fit, treating them as incompetent and denying them the full rights of citizenship. This put them in a position that influential people could, and did, take advantage of. Basically, the Osage were dropping like flies, while their money and mineral rights filtered into the hands of the dishonest guardians and relatives of their white loved ones. In one particular family, the main focus of this book, an Osage woman saw virtually her entire family taken down by poison, bullets and a bomb, and her own health was failing until she was taken out of the care of doctors who seemed to be involved in the conspiracy. But then, who wasn't? Who could you trust when detectives hired to investigate the crimes were themselves in on them, along with the sheriff, local police, the county prosecutor, the governor, the state's top investigator, and lawyers and medical personnel? How do you, supposing you're Tom White, get to the truth when you can't trust any official in the entire state, because a word breathed to the wrong person leads, time after time, to a suspect or witness being murdered, evidence disappearing, a cooperative defendant suddenly deciding not to cooperate, etc.?

The mystery in this book isn't just engaging; it's disturbing. Tom White and his team solved just one tiny corner of a huge and complex web of mystery. Other culprits apparently got away with wholesale murder and fraud, some in spite of their involvement being known to law enforcement, because there was not enough solid evidence to convict them. The death toll was staggering. That's what makes me choose the word "disturbing" to describe it - the apparent fact that the murder for money of Osage Indians was not just the act of a few people, but a systemic activity in which Oklahoman society was generally complicit. It's a chilling tale of husbands conspiring to kill their wives, wives their husbands, parents their children, and so on, and the few white people who raised a finger to stop it promptly turned up as horribly murdered corpses. The deeper author Grann delves into this case, the more unnervingly awful it becomes, until disgust with the human race finishes in a tie with feelings of intrigue and appreciation of the triumph of justice in the story's central case.

Killers of the Flower Moon is an example of the kind of investigative journalism, sometimes just a tad fictionalized, structured in the form of a novel, that Truman Capote is sometimes credited with inventing in his book In Cold Blood. From time to time - mostly before I started this series of book reviews - I have hugely enjoyed an example of this genre, such as Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, Dava Sobel's Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, Robert M. Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Ross King's Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling and my personal favorite, The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinniss. I'm just mentioning books that I haven't reviewed, or of which my review is now lost; others, like a recent book by M.T. Anderson about Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, are also on that favored shelf of my mental library: great pieces of non-fiction entertainment. In many cases, they're as gripping as a thriller novel, to which the knowledge that they're a true story just adds zest. This book hits that nail on the head, and countersinks it with a bibliography and end-notes that document the meticulous research that lies behind the chilling tale.

David Grann is a New Yorker magazine writer whose other book-length works of investigative journalism include The Lost City of Z, a book about an ill-fated expedition into the Amazon jungle which was made into a movie starring Charlie Hunnam last year; The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, an anthology of previously published essays about real-life mysteries; and this year's The White Darkness, about an expedition to Antarctica.