The
true story of a federal investigator who broke a murderous conspiracy
orchestrated by a white businessman who was murdering Osage Indians in order to
acquire their oil lease money.
This
is a story that has a little bit of everything—sex, murder, greed, money,
racial politics. The author (who also wrote the terrific LOST CITY OF Z), takes
pains to place us into time and place as the story begins, and there are hints
of Osage ritual in Anna’s funeral that are both visual and moving. (Mollie’s
family practices a blend of Catholicism and Osage tradition.)
He
also takes his time setting up his characters, particularly the complex,
charismatic William Hale, a white businessman known as “the King of the Osage
Hills. The “plot’ has a lot of moving parts and there are wheels within wheels
turning here.
The
family relationships of both the whites and the Osage are complicated. And the
people are equally complicated. Bill Smith, a white man, was a horse thief before
marrying a wealthy Osage woman. He was known to “raise his hand to her” and to
say to other white men that hitting his woman was the only way to handle a
squaw. (Like the other white men married to Osage, Bill was called a “squaw
man.”) But when the murders started happening and his mother-in-law died in the
exact same way that his first wife, Bill genuinely wanted to get to the bottom
of it.
