KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON by David Grann

David Grann may not be my favorite non-fiction writer, but he does manage to unearth some little known but fascinating historical episodes, and he goes beyond just immersing himself in his subject matter.  He becomes an active participant.  Here he addresses a period in the 1920s when Osage tribe members in Oklahoma were being gunned down and poisoned by white men.  The Osage had shrewdly held on to the mineral rights for property that the U.S. government took from them, and oil leases made the Osage ridiculously wealthy.  In many cases, however, white men were appointed as “guardians” for Osage tribe members who were deemed incompetent for no particular reason.  Mollie Burkhart became reclusive in order to avoid the same fate as her mother and three sisters, all of whom perished during this time, including one sister who was shot in the back of the head.  Corruption was also rampant throughout law enforcement, until Hoover became the FBI director and hired former Texas Ranger Tom White to investigate the Osage murders.  White hired some trustworthy men to work undercover, as the Osage had lost all faith in achieving justice, especially through a U.S. government agency.  White does eventually get his man, but the author conducts a much later investigation of his own, based on archived documents and conversations with the grandchildren of other victims.  His discoveries are mind-blowing, bringing the number of murdered Osage tribe members well into the hundreds, with dozens of murderers going unpunished.  This book just reminded me that a portion of humanity will always be ruled by greed and will go to any lengths to attain the power and money they crave.  I applaud David Grann for bringing this sad piece of history to our attention, but sometimes this book dragged.  The photographs, however, were a welcome distraction.

THE NEED by Helen Phillips

The first fifty or so pages of this novel are tantalizing and gripping, but then the plot veers sharply into a weird universe.  The sci-fi angle, which is mildly intriguing, is juxtaposed with a story of an exhausted and indulgent mother of an infant and an unruly four-year-old, but the motherhood angle just wore me out.  Breastfeeding considerations occupy way too many pages, and the toddler is old enough for a healthy dose of behavioral consequences which the mother, Molly, is too pooped to dish out.  Molly also works as a paleobotanist and is excavating a pit near a Phillips 66 station that has been converted into a headquarters for her and her coworkers.  This pit has yielded some inexplicable finds, including a Bible in which all pronouns referencing God are female.  Religious zealots become incensed and obsessed with the Bible, and I would have preferred more focus on that artifact, along with the ramifications of its discovery, and less focus on toddler tantrums.  Molly is patient to a fault, both with her kids and with the other main character, about whom I don’t want to reveal too much.  I get it that managing two small children leaves no time for much of anything else, but the ad nauseam drudgery of Molly’s life as a parent pretty much nullifies the very promising opening of this novel.  The book is a little spooky throughout, in a mind-bending, Stephen King sort of way.  The plot loses its sense of urgency early on, but I have to say that I still wanted to know how the author was going to resolve its central conflict.  I actually liked the ending—but not nearly as much as the beginning.

THE GUEST LIST by Lucy Foley

I am willing to overlook some bad grammar (“on behalf of my new wife and I”) and a few sentences that seem to belong elsewhere when a book is an absorbing page-turner.  This novel moves at breakneck speed, despite having several narrators, all easily distinguishable, and a slightly wiggly timeline.  The action takes place on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, which is the location for a wedding between two beautiful people—physically beautiful, that is.  Jules has built a magazine from the ground up, and her husband-to-be, Will, is a reality show star.  Jules thought everything was going to be perfect until she received an anonymous note saying that Will is not who he seems and imploring her not to marry him.  Hannah, a wedding guest and one of the primary narrators, is married to Charlie, who is a long-time close friend of the bride.  As Charlie seems to be cozying up more and more to Jules, Hannah befriends Jules’s troubled younger sister Olivia and encourages her to open up about a past trauma. Painful histories notwithstanding, the characters are a pretty shallow bunch, and we know early on that one of them is murdered after the ceremony.  I had a pretty good idea who the victim was, and I was right, but I had no idea who the murderer was, as so many motives became apparent for so many characters.  There is plenty of suspense to go around, and little by little we learn of unexpected connections and secrets between the various wedding attendees.  The ending is tidy, but I did not find it completely satisfying.

THE COLD MILLIONS by Jess Walter

This book proves that I can’t necessarily judge an author by his previous work.  I was not a huge fan of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, but this novel is completely different in a completely positive way.  The primary characters are two brothers, Ryan (Rye) and Gregory (Gig) who ride the rails in the early 1900s to Spokane.  They survive on whatever work they can find at a time when corrupt employment agencies are flourishing.  The charismatic Gregory is the idealist, engaged in a fight for free speech at a union protest, and Ryan, only seventeen but the more practical of the two, idealizes Gregory and is willing to follow his older brother’s lead regardless of the consequences.  This book is a rough-and-tumble adventure, complete with violence, bribery, and historical figures that I had never heard of.  Ryan soon emerges as the principal character, attaching himself to the unlikely rabble-rouser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn while Gregory is either in jail or on the move.  Flynn, a teenager herself and pregnant, has an oratory gift and the drive to use it in the struggle to achieve justice for workers.  She’s not the only one who can turn a phrase, though.  My favorite chapter is the first one narrated by Del Dalveaux, whose job it is to slow down Flynn’s efforts.  He arrives in Spokane with these comments:

“I couldn’t believe how the syphilitic town had metastasized….The city was twice the size of the last time I’d hated being there.  A box of misery spilled over the whole river valley.”

The author proves himself to be quite the wordsmith here, creating an atmosphere that reeks of tramps and trains in stark contrast to a wealthy man who poses as his own chauffeur--as sort of a joke that falls flat and doesn’t fool anyone.  The epigraph for Part III is an appropriate Wallace Stegner quote, and this book is reminiscent of his novels about the growing pains of this country, particularly in the West.