The Bones of Paradise — Jonis Agee

The award-winning author of "The River Wife" returns with a multigenerational family saga set in the unforgiving Nebraska Sand Hills 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 Seventh 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 J.B.'s family: his cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and teenage young sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds, the history of the dysfunctional Bennetts and their damning secrets is 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.