"Killers of the Flower Moon" spent a total of 5 weeks on the NY Times Best Sellers List, was a massive financial success, and has recently been turned into a major Hollywood movie. It tells the story of a long string of murders of Osage Indians in the 1920's in Oklahoma on and around the Osage Reservation. David Grann, the author, has had a long career as a major writer for several important American magazines including "The New Republic", "The Atlantic Monthly", and "The New York Times Magazine". He has also published at least five major books most of which have been best sellers. He is a prolific writer, a highly productive and successful writer, a truly commercial writer. But, based on this book, which is a wonderful read, he is not now and not likely to ever become a "great writer". This book is written in a compelling fashion intended to hold the average reader's attention to the very end. It is well crafted for the commercial market but one should remember that the average American reader is poorly educated with less than a high school education, reads only about 15 minutes a day, and almost never reads a newspaper. Their ability to discriminate between good and lesser quality writing is almost nonexistent. The book will hold your attention and, in my opinion, it is well worth reading because it tells an important historical story about one of our many minority groups in this country, and actually led me to read further about the Osage tribe in fiction. In addition to being the product of extensive research both in historical documents and interviews with living people, the book is copiously supported with genuine photographs of many of the principal people in the story, both victims and perpetrators.
During the 1920's and, perhaps, both before and after that decade numerous members of the Osage tribe were murdered in order for their government appointed guardians to assume control of the vast amounts of money tribe members were collecting from the sale of oil drilling rights on the extensive acreage of the reservation. During that time period, the Osage were collectively and individually among the richest people in America because the reservation land, which the government had assumed was worthless before designating it as the reservation, proved to be the richest oil field in the country at the time. It became common practice for the Osage to be designated by courts to be incompetent to manage their own money and they were given guardians who were always white and nearly always corrupt. In the long run, many of those court appointed guardians became the murderers and financial successors to their Osage wards. The plot of the book is the story from murder to arrest and conviction of what seems to have been only a small percentage of those felonious guardians. The book also leaves little doubt that many more deaths of Osage tribe members were likely also uninvestigated murders. This book is worth reading and any negative statements I have made about it are indictments of the overall book publishing industry and the average American just as much as they may be directly about the author and his writing style. I can give him one unreserved commendation in that he is, or his staff are, tremendous researcher(s).
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