Quick answer
The closest matches are Mean Spirit, Linda Hogan’s 1990 novel about the same Osage murders, and Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe’s investigation of a 1972 killing and its cover-up in Northern Ireland. For the Indigenous history around the crimes, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer is the essential next step; the list below adds true-crime classics and a Canadian investigation.
8 books to read after Killers of the Flower Moon
Mean SpiritClosest match
Hogan’s first novel is a murder mystery set in Osage territory in the 1920s, as oil wealth draws deadly greed. After Nola Blanket sees her mother killed, she is taken in by her cousins, the Greyclouds, while more Osage die and officials cover up the crimes, until a Lakota agent of the Bureau of Investigation arrives. It was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Why read itIt is the same history told as fiction, from inside the Osage community, 27 years before Grann’s book.
Say NothingClosest match
Keefe starts from the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, in Belfast, and widens out to a history of the Troubles through figures such as Dolours and Marian Price, Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams. It won the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and became a television series in 2024.
Why read itLike Grann, Keefe reopens a decades-old killing, follows the people who knew and stayed silent, and turns one family’s loss into the history of a whole community.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
Treuer, who grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, writes Native American history from 1890 to the present as a story of endurance and adaptation rather than disappearance. He combines history with interviews, memoir and reportage. It was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Why read itIt complicates the tragedy framing that Grann’s book and Bury My Heart share: the Osage murders are one chapter of a history Treuer insists is about Indian life, not only Indian death.
Seven Fallen Feathers
Talaga, a journalist of Anishinaabe descent, investigates the deaths of seven Indigenous high-school students in Thunder Bay, Ontario, between 2000 and 2011, most of them largely unsolved. She sets the deaths against the history of Canada’s residential schools. It won the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize.
Why read itIt is the closest modern parallel: Indigenous deaths that authorities failed to investigate properly, reconstructed by a reporter from records and families’ testimony.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Brown’s history covers the decades of war, broken treaties and removals that ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. It tells the story of the American West from the perspective of the Native nations who lost their land.
Why read itIt supplies the background Grann’s book assumes: how treaties and removals put the Osage on the land where the oil was later found.
In Cold Blood
Capote reconstructs the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, and follows the killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, through arrest, trial and execution. Investigators and journalists later showed that some scenes and quotes were embellished or invented.
Why read itIt is the model for the reported murder narrative Grann works in, set in the same Great Plains, and a useful contrast in how strictly each writer sticks to the record.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Summerscale reconstructs the 1860 murder of three-year-old Saville Kent at Road Hill House in Wiltshire and the investigation by Jack Whicher, one of the first detectives at Scotland Yard. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2008.
Why read itBoth books are built from archives around a single case and a single investigator, and both show a new kind of police force proving itself on one murder.
The Wager
Grann tells the story of HMS Wager, a Royal Navy ship wrecked off Patagonia in 1741, and the mutiny among its survivors, using logbooks, letters and court-martial records. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio acquired the screen rights in 2022.
Why read itIt is Grann’s archival method again, this time asking how survivors’ competing accounts were shaped to escape blame.
Frequently asked questions about books like Killers of the Flower Moon
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