No Ordinary Bird: Drug Smuggling, a Plane Crash, and a Daughter's Quest for the Truth

by Artis Henderson

Overview

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358650270
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Artis Henderson's work has appeared in the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Reader's Digest and Sierra, among others. Her first memoir, Unremarried Widow, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and named to more than 10 Best of the Year lists. Artis has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the Columbia School of Journalism, and the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A certified master naturalist and advanced open water diver, she splits her time between Florida and Portugal.

 

Editorial Reviews

"Meticulously researched and painfully honest, this memoir expertly situates a single extraordinary life within the larger historical context of governmental corruption and the international drug trade (without giving anything away, we’ll just say that this story goes all the way to the top). Part true-crime thriller, part tender elegy, and entirely unforgettable.” — Oprah Daily

“It’s rare to read a memoir so full of both heart and adventure, one so grounded in a daughter’s deeply relatable search for family and at the same time propelled by such high drama and international intrigue. Artis Henderson’s gorgeous search for the truth as she tries to solve the mystery of her father’s life and death reads like true crime, with the twists and turns of the best thrillers." — Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire, The Great Pretender, and The Acid Queen

"Artis Henderson’s unflinching new book is impossible to classify in the best possible way. It is both the story of a journalist’s hunt for the truth and a daughter‘s longing; an American legacy of government interference on the grandest scale and the most intimate aspirations for a better life. It simmers with rage, hums with curiosity, shimmers with wonder and adventure. It’s also just a really good story, beautifully told, layer after layer." — Julia Cooke is the author of Come Fly the World and Starry and Restless

"Modest and restrained storytelling that packs an unexpected punch.” — Kirkus Reviews

“A searing, moving memoir… No Ordinary Bird is a loving portrait that benefits from the nuance of understanding that, as Lamar liked to say, ‘you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys.’ It is both research-based inquiry—involving travel to Miami, Georgia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Iran, and beyond—and also a memoir of family, love, and risk. Henderson excels at the subtlety required by such a story, and her telling is intriguing, painful, and cathartic. Shelf Talker: A daughter's study of her father's life and death artfully reveals intrigue, astonishing slices of world history, and a loving but flawed man.” — Shelf Awareness

"I wish Artis’s father lived long enough to learn that his daughter became a meticulous reporter with a flair for action packed prose. (Though he’d probably be reading her from prison.) Lamar Chester is both a morally ambiguous criminal and doting father who Artis describes with the complexities of a character straight out of a John D. McDonald novel. Except his incredible story is true." — Griffin Dunne, author of The Afternoon Club

“With twists and turns that feel propulsively surreal, Artis’s story reads like fiction. But behind it all is a steady pulse, the heartbeat of a daughter in search of the truth.” — Annabelle Tometich, Southern Book Prize winning author of The Mango Tree

From the Publisher

2025-07-04
A bittersweet memoir of loss takes a dark turn into the ugly history of U.S. covert geopolitics.

Henderson, whose first bookUnremarried Widow concerned the loss of her husband in the Iraq War, begins this book with the incident that killed her father. In 1985, when she was 5 years old, a plane her father was flying crashed shortly after takeoff from their family farm in North Georgia; she was the only passenger and was seriously injured. Her father, Lamar Chester, had grown up poor not far from where he died and strove mightily to reach the middle class, first in the military, then as an airline pilot. A bit of a daredevil, Chester found he could make a lot more money smuggling drugs from Jamaica and Colombia to South Florida. Within a few years, he owned 500 acres in Georgia and several islands in the Bahamas, where he built luxurious homes with accommodations for his business’ Cessnas. Henderson had sweet memories of boomeranging between estates, being doted on by parents, grandparents, stepsiblings, and the mysterious people working for the family business. As the crash grew dimmer in memory, she became increasingly bothered by the realization that her father’s “business” was criminal and had almost killed her: “I want to resent him for creating a life that put both strangers and the people he loved in danger,” she writes. “But I can’t make myself feel any of that. All I feel is an overwhelming sense of loss.” The first three parts of this book mix together Henderson’s naïve memories and family lore with news stories about the legal troubles her father faced when his empire started crumbling in the Reagan years. It comes as a shock when Henderson’s suspicions about the true nature of the “accident” that killed her father begin to prove warranted.

Modest and restrained storytelling that packs an unexpected punch.

Kirkus Reviews