Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann - 4 stars

[forsanolim]

I'm joining in the group of PBTers reading this this month!

I'm really surprised that I'd never heard about the events of this book at all before--I would have thought that it would have come up before either in a history class or something, but everything in this book was entirely new to me. In the book, Grann focuses on a killing spree of Osage Native Americans in the 1920s in Oklahoma, focusing in particular in a series of murders centering on one Osage family. When oil was found under the Osage reservation in the early 1900s, many Osage became fabulously wealthy, adding substantial complexity to the murders. The book describes the crooked investigation of the murders by the Oklahoma state government and how the fledgling FBI under J. Edgar Hoover and a detective named Tom White dealt with the case. Grann also adds his modern take and further analysis of the murders.

I found the book very easy to read and, especially the middle part, really intriguing. The things that happened to the Osage community, especially Mollie Burkhardt, were horrifying, and I thought that Grann did an excellent job of humanizing the Osage characters in the book, as well as White. I also found myself very surprised at certain key points, when more information was revealed about characters that I had legitimately thought of as good and sympathetic. Now that I'm sitting down to write a review the day after finishing it, I'm definitely noticing how many people played roles in this book--I find myself already forgetting quite a few names of various outlaws, suspects, and detectives--but I was able to keep them straight enough during reading.

I felt that I would have like to know more during the last section of the book, the section consisting of Grann's additions; I felt that this section was a bit rushed. Of course, because Grann is working purely from archives at this point, there's a limited amount of information available to him, but I would have liked to know a bit more about the details of his analysis (intentionally remaining vague here).

[Booknblues]

Thanks for your review. I really liked this as well.