People who like true crime stories will love Killers of the Flower Moon, but I’m not one of them and find it unmoving, though the scope of the conspiracy it describes is fantastical, and the third part is amazing. Like The Name of the Rose, it seems to be a story of detection and reconstruction: who killed Anna Brown? Brown’s sister, Mollie Burkhart, worried about Brown, though Brown “had often gone on ‘sprees,’ as her family disparagingly called them.” But this wasn’t a spree and what seems to concern one murder, at first, turns out to concern many more.

One can see Killers of the Flower Moon in other ways than a story of detection: as parts of government wrangling with other parts of government; as how demand for government leads to greater supply of government (“For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of oppression”—whether they have is left as an exercise to the reader); of how bureaucracy organizes itself to solve problems; of how feudal or rural systems of justice and law enforcement give way to larger modern structures. There is something for people who want to read about ghastly murders and something for people who like Albert Hirschman. Not many books overlap in that venn diagram! There are many sentences about bureaucratic wrangling, like “Because of [x’s] power, a federal prosecutor warned that it was ‘not only useless but positively dangerous’ to try him in the state legal system” (this occurs late in the book and I removed the person’s name to prevent spoilers).

Large-scale conspiracies are so rare that when they do occur they fascinate (think of my post, “The power of conventional narratives and the great lie“). Imagined conspiracies are much more common than actual ones.

At times Killers of the Flower Moon reminds one of a Western like Lonesome Dove:

[Tom] White was an old-style lawman. He had served in the Texas Rangers near the turn of the century, and he had spent much of his life roaming on horseback across the southwestern frontier, a Winchester rifle or pearl-handled six-shooter in hand, tracking fugitives and murderers and stickup men. [. . .] Even when dressed in a stiff suit, like a door-to-door salesman, he seemed to have sprung from a mythic age.

The West as imagined today is built on myth, and so, too, is the FBI—which, in this telling, springs from the Rangers and from similar sources. Which I hadn’t realized. Maybe you hadn’t either. This book is not for me but it may very well be for you. Very few of the sentences stand out as truly excellent, and that to me is a key metric in a book.