The Bones Of Paradise

Ten years after the 7th Calvary massacred more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J. B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J. B.‘s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family: his cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and his young sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds, the history of the dysfunctional Bennett’s and their damning secrets are revealed-exposing the conflicted heart of a nation caught between past and future.

A kaleidoscopic portrait of misfits, schemers, chancers, and dreamers, Jonis Agee’s bold new novel is a panorama of America at the dawn of a new century. A beautiful evocation of this magnificent, blood-soaked land-its sweeping prairies, seas of golden grass and sandy hills, all at the mercy of two unpredictable and terrifying forces, weather and lawlessness-and the durable men and women who dared to tame it. Intimate and epic, The Bones of Paradise is a remarkable achievement: a mystery, a tragedy, a romance, and an unflagging exploration of the beauty and brutality, tenderness and cruelty that defined the settling of the American west.