No Ordinary Bird
Drug Smuggling, a Plane Crash, and a Daughter's Quest for the Truth
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
In the vein of Small Fry or Priestdaddy, No Ordinary Bird is a compelling father-daughter story that reads like true crime, haunted by a question the dashing and mysterious Lamar Chester had always taught his daughter to ask: “How do you tell the good guys from the bad?”
Artis was five when a plane crash killed her beloved father. For years, it was simply called “the accident.”
But many things weren’t getting discussed. Like Lamar himself—a swashbuckling, larger-than-life pilot, a doting father and husband, and the most popular farmer in Georgia. Or that the IRS had immediately taken everything: the chickens, the airplanes, the islands in the Bahamas. . . . Afterwards, Artis and her mother broke contact with everyone and fled, rebuilding from the bottom up as if Lamar’s big, wild life had never happened.
Years later, a friend tells Artis Lamar’s plane was sabotaged: her father had been one of the biggest drug smugglers in Miami in the 1970s. At the time of his death, he was about to testify in a trial that had swept up everyone from the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, to a US district attorney, to the Colombian drug cartels. But the deeper Artis digs, the more unexpected the story becomes.
Beyond the dramatic betrayals, dangerous drug lords, and geopolitical intrigue is the beating heart of this riveting memoir: a daughter’s grappling with a dark legacy and her memories of the father who had been the light of her life. Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, and is there a difference at all?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and memoirist Henderson (Unremarried Widow) delivers a heart-rending account of her father's death in an airplane crash. In June 1985, five-year-old Henderson was a passenger in Lamar's single-engine plane, which took off near their family's Georgia farm for a short joyride. As they neared home, the aircraft crashed, killing Lamar instantly and leaving Henderson with life-threatening injuries. She recovered from what she was told was an accident but came to learn, decades later, that foul play was suspected. In 1975, Lamar began using his plane to smuggle marijuana into the U.S. By 1979, he had purchased five islands in the Bahamas to help him safely refuel his planes and began importing over 10 tons of cannabis each year. Henderson's digging—which revealed her father's possible entanglement with the Iran-Contra affair and new details about his impending court appearance on federal charges just before his death—led her to conclude that Lamar was likely murdered by one of several parties seeking to keep him quiet. Henderson marries her solid journalistic chops with diaristic emotional immediacy, infusing a stranger-than-fiction crime story with deeply personal stakes. It's a unique, exciting, and affecting memoir.
