Not for me. I think this was way too overwrought with useless facts and information that weren’t relevant to the story. I found the midsection about the creation of the FBI super boring and it felt like the author couldn’t decide what he actually wanted to write about. It’s written like a murder mystery but it’s clear who the culprit is and the motive behind the murders; maybe that’s the point but it made the whole setup of the book feel weird and unnecessary tonally. 

I don’t know maybe I’m being a bit too crazy but I just didn’t like the way the story stopped focusing on the Osage and instead focused on the creation of the FBI and the white agents who were involved with the case, especially since the Osage people were such an important part of the case being solved, and especially especially knowing how the police/FBI have completely failed the indigenous communities and MMIW. 

I’m also not a true crime fan in general and don’t really care to hear interviews of suspects and details about crime scenes or whodunnit stories, so I just didn’t like this. 

The information about the Osage community, their wealth, and the way systemic racism affected them was properly enraging but I just don’t know if this author was the right person to tell that story. 

The audiobook narrator talks like Zapp Brannigan which irritated me lol 

The narration on this was well done. I didn’t know anything about the Osage murders before reading this, it left me absolutely horrified and irate. It’s so important to remember the disgusting history of oppression that the US is built on and to take action against the ways that oppression continues to exist. The last third of the book hit me hardest.

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 different groups of the very same government meant to protect them, 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. 

 

I read Grann's novel in tandem with watching Scorsese's film, which only intensified both works' emotional impact on me. Grann's novel, which he spent over a decade researching, focused on Tom White's investigation into the 20-year terrorization of the Osage Nation. White recognized 24 murders associated with this reign, but Grann offers a significantly higher total: 60+. Throughout the novel, Grann offers many options for motives to these murders, but he offers you the above quote: money, power, greed, stolen through a government, a culture that was not only blind to it but complicit to it.

Although passionately researched by Grann over many years, my main gripe with the novel matched the opinion of DiCaprio: Upon reading the screenplay directly adapted from Grann's novel, DiCaprio realized how focused on White, and the true crime/procedural aspects of the novel. Thus, for the film, he offered that the story focuses more on the Osage themselves, specifically on Mollie Burkhart. This, emotionally, is where Grann stumbles the most. While packed with true crime intrigue, the novel focuses the vast majority of the pages on White, his history, and his contributions to the growth and development of the FBI.

This isn't to say that it was poorly written or didn't have a clear emphasis on empathy and self-awareness (of ourselves and the privileges we receive from our culture and system of government). Grann leads us through the mystery in such an intriguing way I could not put the book down for two days straight. His writing style, while simple, was straightforward in all the ways it needed to be. There was no beating around the bush on how horrible these people were. Not to mention, Grann pressed on to meet and interview many Osage families and connect tens more murders to the original "outbreak". It felt cathartic as a reader, and I hope it was even more so for the families that had been waiting a century for closure.

"Killers of the Flower Moon", the film and the novel, are heavy, heart-wrenching works that every American should be exposed to. The sheer nakedness of greed is still occurring today, with the same amount of deeply ingrained racism. Grann's novel taps into these ideas with beauty and tact, and both his and Scorsese's work. I only wish one day these stories will be told by American Indians themselves.