The Bones of Paradise

The award-winning author of The River Wife returns with a multi-generational family saga, set in the unforgiving Nebraska Sandhills in the years following the massacre at Wounded Knee?an ambitious tale of history, vengeance, race, guilt, betrayal, family, and belonging, filled with a vivid cast of characters shaped by violence, love, and a desperate loyalty to the land.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.