Reviews with content warning for Violence - Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

The first two thirds of this book are fascinating and horrifying. Grann's writing is propulsive, driving this true story forward. He does a good job of introducing the horror of what happened to the Osage (both with the murders and generally) and centering it while also introducing you to all of the players. When the FBI finally cracks the case, the members of the conspiracy aren't merely names you're meeting for the first time.

The book peters out in the last third, however, consisting mostly of Gran 's interviews with living descedents of the Osage. Those interviews are interesting but they just lack the electricity of the first parts of the book and aren't helped at all by Grann's insistence of inserting himself into the story (something he did in Lost City of Z as well).

Most egregious though is Grann's rather dubious claim of "solving" one of the unsolved murders. Basically, he reads an old FBI file that, paraphrasing, says "We think this guy did it because x but we can't prove it." Then Grann submits nothing but speculation that he FBI already had.

It's a frustrating ending to an important story that needed to be told.

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minerva1221's review against another edition

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dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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ashaberstroh's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark informative mysterious sad fast-paced

4.75

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lysen5972's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

4.75

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zsabella's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

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rapunzelholly's review against another edition

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dark informative mysterious sad tense medium-paced

4.0

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mariakureads's review against another edition

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dark informative sad tense medium-paced

4.5

Never having read anything by Grann prior, I wasn't sure what to expect, but this was highly detailed and researched with respect and truth to all parties involved.

There's a lot of missing information when it comes to Native Americans and US history-One can guess that a lot more than we probably are aware of, thanks partly to this book. I had no idea, none, that this systematic discriminations and killings were happening Oklahoma and to the Osage in such a cold blooded way until this book.

This book was so well researched that I can't imagine the years and the time needed to put this together but I was left with a lot of emotion and some questions which I'm sure Grann was too as he researched and put this together because it's oddly fascinating that this happened for as long as it did but there's really no limit to man's greed and for a lot of the guilty, their greed exceeded what I could have imagined.
This book highlights how a group of people, men and women, were able to plan and execute murders for their greed and how deep that corruption ran even as the Osage were asking and requesting for help with no avail from the government until the amount of the mysterious deaths was too much to overlook.

I'm a ball of emotions still, hours after I finished this, to really put into words how I'm flabbergasted and tensely in awe of this because it's not just distant past. A lot of the surviving members are still having to deal with this portion of their history, in a familial and at larger community aspect, because of how deep the corruption was that in some cases it was the White spouses that were involved and that's something that is deplorable and I have a hard time trying to rationalize that.

Grann did an amazing job of balancing historical information and providing it such a written way that spoke of the Osage's civilization with respect to race, perspective, culture, and colonialism.

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sheriffrockyraccoon's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative mysterious sad fast-paced

4.0

While I am a movie person and obviously watched the Oscars this year where its movie adaptation was frequently nominated, I had managed to avoid knowing much about the Osage murders before reading this book.

David Grann’s writing is fantastic. He manages to keep his language accessible and fluid while also not deviating too far from the facts of the case. This book is part thriller, part nonfiction, and while it is easy to cross that line into sensationalism, I believe Grann worked incredibly hard to make sure the families of the victims were heard and not drowned out by the “true crime” aspects of the case.

The last chapter, “A Case Unsolved”, devastated me. Just when you think there has been justice for these people ignored by the U.S. government, you see how far the conspiracy goes. It was heartbreaking and real, which I appreciated considering how easy it is today to write a true crime story in the form of a ghost story. This book served as a brutal reminder of the treatment Indigenous Americans have endured- and still endure- at the hands of the government.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in U.S. history, especially that of the Wild West. While it may be after the period we consider “Western”, it holds the same ideology even as the country moves into a different era.

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