David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon reconstructs the murders of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma after oil was found under their land, and the guardianship system that let white men control and inherit that wealth.

Grann spent years in county archives and with Osage descendants, and the last section turns the book on the reader by showing the killings were far more numerous than the FBI case ever established.

The Lost City of Z follows a vanished Amazon explorer and includes his own inept trip into the same jungle. The Wager takes an eighteenth-century shipwreck and two irreconcilable survivor accounts. He writes for the New Yorker and the research is the method.