Author Guide ·
Books Written by
Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose specialty is the true story that reads like it shouldn’t be true — a vanished Amazon expedition, a string of unsolved Osage murders, a shipwreck mutiny. He spends years on each book, and it shows: the reporting is exhaustive, the prose is restrained, and the horror is allowed to speak for itself rather than being oversold.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Investigative Journalism · Updated August 2026
Investigative Journalism · True CrimeOn my shelf
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
The story of the Osage Nation, made suddenly wealthy by oil rights in 1920s Oklahoma, and the systematic campaign of murder that followed as white settlers schemed to seize that wealth through marriage, guardianship, and outright killing. Grann traces the case that became one of the FBI’s first major investigations, and the far larger scale of the murders the investigation never solved.
The book’s real achievement is structural — it starts as a detective story and slowly reveals itself to be a story about an entire system built to erase a crime, not just commit one.
Adventure · Journalism
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
The story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for a lost city he believed proved an advanced civilization had once existed there. Grann retraces Fawcett’s route himself, weaving his own expedition into the historical account.
Half biography, half first-person adventure narrative. Grann’s willingness to put himself and his own physical limits into the story gives the book a tension the purely historical chapters don’t have on their own.
History · Adventure
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
The true story of a British Navy ship that wrecked off Patagonia in 1741, and the mutiny, starvation, and murder that followed among the survivors — who returned to England years apart telling wildly conflicting versions of what happened, each accusing the others of the actual crime.
Grann’s sharpest formal trick here is refusing to resolve which survivor’s account is true until very late — the book makes you feel the same uncertainty a court martial would have faced.
Adventure · Journalism
The White Darkness
A shorter book, originally a New Yorker piece, about British explorer Henry Worsley’s obsessive attempts to complete Ernest Shackleton’s unfinished Antarctic crossing — alone, on foot, pulling his own supplies.
The most compressed and personal of Grann’s books. It reads almost like a character study of obsession itself, using Antarctica as the instrument that finally reveals what Worsley was actually chasing.
Essay Collection · True Crime
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession
A collection of Grann’s New Yorker investigative pieces, covering a Sherlock Holmes scholar found dead under suspicious circumstances, a possibly wrongful execution in Texas, and a con man who impersonated a missing French boy, among others.
The best entry point if you want to sample Grann’s method before committing to a full book — each piece is a compressed version of the same patient, skeptical reporting.
