A varied and well-crafted assemblage of missing person accounts.
A true-crime collection recounts some of Texas’ most intriguing disappearances.
Virtually everyone has heard of the Bermuda Triangle, but how many readers know that Texas has its own lengthy history of unexplained vanishings, from sailors and farmers to outlaws and teens? “I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination,” wrote author Ambrose Bierce before famously disappearing over the Mexican border. “His fate is a question mark,” writes Bills of Bierce. “We’re left with only rumor and speculation. But Bierce was not the first or the last person to go missing in Texas—his date with oblivion just generated the most interest and fanfare.” With this book, Bills delves into 20 other cases that generated far less fanfare. The oil tanker SS Marine Sulphur Queen, which sailed out of Beaumont with 39 men, never made it to its destination. The pilot of a small chartered flight was never located even though the plane was found at a remote airport with blood in the cabin and a bullet hole in the roof. At the height of the Depression, two duck hunters snuck over the border of the King Ranch—a “Walled Kingdom” with a million acres and its own extralegal justice—never to be seen again. Not all of the cases are recent history. Texas has been swallowing people up since at least the 19th century, like Jesse Evans, Billy the Kid’s lesser-known partner in crime, who disappeared the day he was released from the famous Huntsville Penitentiary. Two priests associated with the cathedral in Brownsville also vanished—one in a storm in the Gulf of Mexico and one off the back of his horse while visiting the outlying ranches of his parish. There are more traditional true-crime abductions as well, including the cases of the four young women who went missing in Galveston over the course of the 1980s. Some were murdered; some merely disappeared; but none of their remains have ever been found.
Bills’ volume harkens back to an earlier, pulpier era of paperback true crime. His prose style is lean and matter-of-fact, though he knows how to give each narrative a satisfying shape—no easy feat when the mysteries are never solved: “After the M/V Southern Cities’ next-to-last Gulf of Mexico crossing in 1966,” begins one story about a missing tugboat, “its chief engineer, Frank McCarney, quit his post in Port Isabel, Texas….He would later tell a Coast Guard fact-finding panel that even though the tugboat had been in ‘first class condition,’ he was ‘scared’ of the vessel. That fear probably saved McCarney’s life.” The author finds captivating angles even in otherwise run-of-the-mill cases, like “Without a Trace,” in which an adult learns that he had an older half brother who vanished forever when the man was a baby. Authoritative and well-researched, the stories are enthralling not only for their enigmatic natures, but also for the colorful picture they paint of Texas: its history, its culture, and the ways its crimes get investigated (or not). The book is the perfect read for a plane ride or beach day—preferably one in the Lone Star State.
A varied and well-crafted assemblage of missing person accounts.Pub Date: April 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-54-024689-9
Page Count: 178
Publisher: History PR
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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