While the facts are of tragic interest the writer doesn't bring the characters to life--leaving them on the pages as old and remote as the grainy photographs in the book.

There are available on youtube some "drive through" videos of Osage County, Oklahoma. If you haven't had the chance to drive through the county yourself, take a few minutes and watch one of those videos just to understand what it looks like now. Then start this book remembering that the events depicted in it are now almost a hundred years in the past. It will make you appreciate all the more the masterful description given by David Grann.This is a tough story about a tough area that had seen nothing but tough times until oil was discovered in what seemed to be endless quantities.With the oil came money, lots of it. And the struggle to control that money turns deadly. Exploitation of people by gender, social class and national origin runs rampant; with the biggest irony being that it is the Native Americans who are exploited by the "Anglo" Americans.Throw in some brave Texas lawmen, an already eccentric and inconsistent young J Edgar Hoover, and some remarkably strong women who managed to tell their stories to their daughters and granddaughters and this story just crackles with excitement and emotion.Mister Grann is a graduate of what used to known as Connecticut College For Women. One of the intended consequences of having that venerable institution become a coeducational college is that the male graduates have tendencies to write well about the women's point of view. The women leaders connected to CC such as Jane Addams, Mary Morrisson, Rosemary Park, and the Wright and Larrabee sisters would all be proud.Read this book because it needs to be part of your Education with a capital E.

This was/is a very popular book with reviewers and many readers. The story is very important and not well known. It should be. The telling, I think, is not so wonderful. In the 1920s many Osage Indians were murdered for profit in Oklahoma. The details make for a gripping story. For this book, however, David Grann learns a lot of details after he writes the book. Then he goes (back, I assume) to Oklahoma and learns a lot more. Rather than rewrite the book, he just adds these details at the end. The story is a complex one and Grann gives it out like a journalist, in installments. It was clear to me who his main villains would be 200 pages before they were named.Now, if you despise racism, which I hope you do, Gann’s book gives us a look at crimes which were tolerated because their victims were not white. For this reason, the book, easy to read, is worth your time. A much better history of these events will be written, but probably not anytime soon. So, I recommend it. The writing is clear. There is no index. There is a fair amount of padding (an auction scene, for example, is importent only if you do not know how bidding works). However, Americans should know this story. And now you can.

I am part Osage so this book was incredibly fascinating to me. The research is very thorough. I especially enjoyed hearing what happened to the major players after it was over. The last part of the book is the author describing how he ended up solving another of the murders during his research. It's hard to believe it was real life and not a made up story. Very well done.

Pretty awful story about yet another way we destroyed the lives of Native Americans. The pacing was slow and added too much irrelevant data. The book seemed as though it was a thesis fluffed up to book length.