I audiobooks this. It was okay, but obviously a man wrote this.

Good story that’s super interesting just felt super slow and hard to follow

A daunting and well written book detailing the horrible murders of the Osage during the early 1900s. Grann has taken great care into researching the story and fully uncovered the scope of these awful murders. It is important that the worst parts of American history should not disappear and be forgotten.

I listened to the audio version and it may have been a bad idea, but it did really highlight three distinct sections of the book:
1. Written almost as historical fiction, the writing is colorful and engaging.
2. When the FBI gets involved, a new narrator appears and the writing becomes government gray, with broad summaries of apparently months or years of investigations (timing became a mystery to me at some point). The pacing in this section felt off to me.
3. The author relates his own experience researching the book and things he discovered that were left out of the FBI investigation.

Overall a recommended read. This untold chapter of the Native American experience needs to be told and used to help correct past wrongs and change current attitudes and behaviors in our culture.

Really interesting American history lesson.

Further, shout out to this book for keeping me sane on a very long drive.

I wanted to give this book 5 stars but I can’t. Not sure if this is because I listened to the audiobook instead of reading it, but it just seemed a bit dragged out to me. The story is was very interesting. Honestly, it was just plain sad, but not very surprising if you know anything about US history and the indigenous people. Also I thought the book would give more details about the formation of the FBI with the title but it doesn’t. Overall, I am happy to have read this story and learn about the atrocities that occurred to the Osage nation

Didn’t realize that I reserved the young readers edition from my library. But still a good listen. I’m guessing the grown up version was a bit more graphic, considering the subject matter. I think most Native American history books can easily be cross categorized as True Crime. It seemed like the last several minutes of this book was, “by the way, here are a bunch of other murders that happened which were never looked into.” Yowza!
There was also a connection to my hometown. Always interesting to learn more local lore to share with others.