A true story of a murderous conspiracy

I enjoy books of investigative journalism, especially when they involve true crimes or disasters. I like them to be well researched and to present a balanced view of what happened and to be clear about what is unknown. David Grann is an author I like and I have recently read The Wager about a tragic sea voyage (see review here) and The Lost City of Z about a lost expedition in the South American rainforest (see review here). But this author’s most celebrated book is Killers of the Flower Moon which I understand has now been made into a feature film, although I haven’t seen it.

The little known story which the author recounts in this book is one of murders which occur in the families of the Osage indigenous American people in the 1920s (known at the time as American Indians and described as such in the book). The Osage people were unique among the indigenous peoples of American in that the land where they had been forcibly resettled was rich in oil and the people owned, as a group, the mineral rights. The Osage people were wealthy beyond the dreams of most other American people and they lived as wealthy people with all the trappings including servants, private education and large cars – this was not always appreciated by the some of the white community who resented their riches.

In the 1920s there were a series of murders among the Osage people that seemed inexplicable at the time. There seemed to be no link between these murders but they kept occurring and became more violent, including the complete destruction of a house by a bomb with the resident family all killed in it.

The FBI existed in a very basic form and its head J Edgar Hoover wanted the agency to make a name for itself so he asked one of his operatives, Tom White, to try and unravel the mystery. White came up against much opposition but he began to discern a suspicious and deeply concerning pattern in the killings. His problem was that he might not be able to get other people to believe what he had found nor to get the authorities to hold a fair trial for the killers.

This book is written in such a way that you are drawn into the story little by little and you realise what is happening along with the investigators. It’s a sad and tragic story about greed and racism and the author tells it clearly focussing on individual families and their experiences. It’s a gripping tale of a murderous conspiracy that I had never heard before. I listened to the audiobook version which was narrated by Will Patton, Ann Marie Lee and Danny Campbell and which I thought was done very well. This is an excellently told story.