One of my gifts this past holiday season was a great read: Killers of the Summer Moon by David Grann. I didn’t pick up on the author’s name initially, but Grann was already known to me by an earlier nonfiction work of his, The Lost City of Z.
Killers of the Flower Moon is about the Osage Native American murders that occurred in Oklahoma in the early part of the last century. The story basically goes like this: The Osage tribe lost their land but retained the mineral rights. Oil lay under the Osage land, which made the Osage tribe members wealthy. Through corrupt local government white people could get themselves appointed as “guardians” (which essentially allowed them to control the Osage tribe member funds), and if the person whose funds they controlled died, the money went to the white person controlling those funds. You can imagine what this led to: The Osage members started dying in large numbers under mysterious circumstances. The local and state governments had little interest in addressing the issue and the murders continued. It was a young J. Edgar Hoover’s newly-minted FBI that solved the case. That, all by itself, made for a fascinating story, made all the more interesting by it being true.
At the end of the book, Grann found a way to make the story even more interesting. The scale and scope of the murders were significantly greater than even the FBI realized, with Osage murders both preceding and following the years covered by the FBI investigation. Grann’s personal research brought this latest revelation to light.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a great book and I couldn’t put it down. I think you will enjoy it.
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