A vivid, unflinching, and suspenseful true-crime story from a soulful new voice.
A young writer dives deep in an attempt to solve a cold case in her hometown.
One early morning in 1983, LaHaye Fontenot’s great-grandfather Aubrey—a retired bank president, “handshake businessman,” and civic leader in Mamou, Louisiana—was kidnapped from his home. Ten days later he was found dead in nearby Bayou Nezpique, bruised and muddy. For those 10 days, the LaHaye family compound was central command for local officials and FBI agents working a case on scant, fuzzy details provided by MawMaw Emily, the author’s great-grandmother. Aubrey’s murder and the search for his killer redefined a prominent family whose own history was deeply enmeshed in a changing Acadiana town. Even after a conviction, the family’s presumption of safety, even untouchability, was jarred; the incident sparked a string of tragedies and losses and became a loaded family myth shrouded in mystery and secret suspicions. Donning the mantle of an investigative reporter with decades more experience, LaHaye Fontenot resolves to put an end to familial silence, whispered theories, and unfollowed leads. Unnerved by the persistent claim of innocence from the man imprisoned for Aubrey’s murder, the author claws through official records and mines the long-closeted memories of generations of relatives. It is a bold move to anchor a debut work in raising questions about one’s own family history and small-town justice system, but LaHaye Fontenot’s pursuit is marked by judicious research, her honest, if complicated, effort at impartiality, and rhapsodic details that honor her home and heritage. From her macabre opening scene through the exhaustion of her material and the various problems of legal and social practice that intersect with her project, she confronts both her family’s grand legacy and the challenges of finding true resolution in nonfiction.
A vivid, unflinching, and suspenseful true-crime story from a soulful new voice.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780063257962
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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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