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Fiction A witness to change THE LIGHTHORSEMEN: A Novel of Indian Territory By Jack Shakely 214 pp. Strider Nolan Reviewed by Bob Sanchez The Creek Indian Billy Mingo murders a man who he says really “needed killing.” The year is 1895, and the law catches up to him. Mingo surrenders to the Lighthorsemen, the Creek Nation’s law enforcement, and he admits his guilt. Creek judges sentence him to death, but according to custom they tell him to go home and be with his family for most of a year and “return on the first Saturday in August 1896 to be executed.” Mingo complies on the appointed day, and in the audience the journalist Edward Perryman watches the man’s death by firing squad. Perryman is deeply impressed by the murderer’s honor and bravery, and by the system of laws that command such respect even from a convicted criminal. Perryman decides to become part of this honorable Creek legal system, first by becoming a Lighthorseman and eventually a lawyer to protect his people. The execut...

Fiction Sticking to your ribs TESTIMONY By Scott Turow 477 pp. Grand Central Publishing Group Reviewed by Jack Shakely In our current world of courtroom drama novels, we have John Grisham, who’s been phoning them in for years, James Patterson, who turns out to be not a single author, but a factory of writers, and Scott Turow. Thank goodness. Turow is a master of legal drama, and Testimony may be his best to date. Its sharp observations and page-turning plot twists are pure Turow and pure pleasure. Like his other nine novels, Testimony begins in Kindle County (a poorly disguised Cook County and Turow’s Yoknapatawpha), but it quickly launches attorney William ten Boom across the Atlantic to The Hague, and its various courts for war crimes and international disputes.   Turow writes in the first person, so ten Boom and the reader can explore together the arcane world of The Hague, where lawyers still wear black robes with starched lacy dickies and nothing is exactly as it seems. Turo...

Nonfiction The richest and unluckiest KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI By David Grann 291 pp. Doubleday Reviewed by Jack Shakely The Osage were the tallest of all the Indian people, standing well over six feet on average, and perhaps the fittest. When the artist George Catlin first spied them in 1835 in their original home in the Missouri Valley, he proclaimed them “ the finest example of physical beauty, Indian or white, I have ever seen.” Shunted aside to a rocky reservation in what is now eastern Oklahoma, the Osage found that they were sitting on one of the largest oil reserves ever discovered. By the beginning of World War One, the Osage were the richest people in America. Also the unluckiest. This is a tale of treachery of whites against the Osage so profound that it stuns the imagination. Almost every judge, every sheriff, every deputy and most of the bankers in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s were in on the take. If we didn’t have grap...

Nonfiction The footballingest football book ever THE PERFECT PASS: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football By S. C. Gwynne 271 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Jack Shakely I was born and raised in Oklahoma, the state that legendary coach Bennie Owens said had two favorite sports, football and spring football. I am nuts about football. I bleed crimson and cream every autumn Saturday for my beloved Oklahoma Sooners. I thought I could never get enough football. Until I read The Perfect Pass. This is the footballingest football book you will ever read outside of the Dallas Cowboys playbook. Even Vince Lombardi’s autobiography has fewer diagrams. It has more x’s and o’s than a game of tic-tac-toe. Which is surprising, given the book’s author. S. C. Gwynne is the Pulitzer-prize finalist author of the brilliant Empire of the Summer Moon, one of the best nonfiction books ever written about the Plains Indians. He has the writing chops, and he often shows them here. But not often enough. I thou...