A review by abookishmagpie
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

 I’m sure most people recognize this as the title as the one that inspired the most recent Leonardo DiCaprio movie of the same name, and the movie coming out pushed me to pick it up because after hearing the synopsis I knew that I wanted to know more about this major historical event that I had never learned about in school. This non-fiction book lays out the story of the “Reign of Terror” that the Osage Indians faced in the early 1920s where many of their citizens were dying in quick numbers seemingly out of nowhere. David Grann focuses his time on a group of murders that directly affect Mollie Burkhart who lost her sisters, mother brother-in-law and started to become sick herself. After upwards of 20 Osage have died in a short period of time the Bureau of Investigations (later known as the FBI) sends in Agent Tom White and a team to investigate why these mysterious deaths have managed to not been solved by local authorities. What is uncovered is a mess of lying, cheating and deliberate murder by local men who have lived with the Osage for years, some even marrying into the tribe, to steal the head rights these Osage members had for the oil that was discovered on their land and made these people some of the richest in the nation at the time. It is a story that should be a wildly creative fictional murder mystery, but sadly it is a real historic event of our country that has been pushed to the side as time moves on. Grann does an incredible amount of research on this event and documents everything very well. I really appreciate the time he spent making sure as much came to light as did, and the other Osage families and allies he mentions in the last part of the book. People he met while researching this book and who he has tried to also help and shed light on murders that might have gone unheard of that existed outside the dedicated time frame of “The Reign Of Terror”. A very heavy read, but an excellent one.