Darswords

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First, the blurb:

From the best-selling author of The Lost City of Z, soon to be a major film starring Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, and Robert Pattison, comes a true-life murder story that became one of the newly created FBI’s first major homicide investigations.

In the 1920s the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And this was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.

As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations, and the bureau badly bungled it. In desperation its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage, he and his undercover team began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

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The team of David Grann (Author), Will Patton (Narrator), Ann Marie Lee (Narrator), Danny Campbell (Narrator), and Random House Audio (Publisher) made quite the book. In this case, an audiobook from Libby. I loved how it was broken up between the narrators. It presented the story with the Osage, then the FBI, then the reporter. As you would hope, there is an overlapping of what happened, but from each point of view, it gives a more vivid picture of what might have happened so long ago.

This pulled me in even though I am not one for history or true crime. Probably because it centered on the non-white man, whom most history is about. I am ashamed of my history classes as there was no mention of the Osage Indians. See the above sentence.

I feel richer knowing the story though sadder to see what happened to this tribe, or any other non-white male. I highly recommend this read.

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