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?

• A Daughter’s Quest for Truth: Decades after a fatal plane crash, Artis Henderson unravels the life of the father she adored—a man who was also one of Miami's biggest drug smugglers.
• Pilots, Planes, and International Intrigue: Fly back to the 1970s and ’80s, from the treacherous skies over the Caribbean to secret airstrips in the Georgia mountains, in a story where aviation is both freedom and a federal crime.
• A Private Island Empire: Discover the story of the Darby Islands in the Bahamas, a lavish personal kingdom built with drug money that became the center of a smuggling operation reaching the highest levels of government.
• Family Saga Meets True Crime: Uncover a dark family legacy wrapped in the larger-than-life history of the War on Drugs, the Iran-Contra affair, and the shadowy Operation Lone Star.