On April 1, 1752, a party of Creek warriors fired on a small group of Cherokee men. The two nations were at war. But the Creeks had made a serious tactical error: they beheaded their enemies on the high road across colonial South Carolina, across the street from the biggest church in the region, and within sight of the governor's mansion. Both sides had just made a deal with alarmed colonists that British settlements would be neutral territory. The Cherokee deaths left the colonists outraged: they were murder, an insult to the Crown, a threat to their own rights and safety. The Cherokees were hardly happy, either. Eventually, the Creeks settled the matter by executing the man held responsible, a local war leader named Acorn Whistler. In this carefully researched and well-written account of the case, Joshua Piker (history, U. of Oklahoma) tells the story Rashomon-style, from four different perspectives: the British Colonial Governor, the Creek Emperor Malatchi, local tribal members, and local colonists. Piker skillfully reconstructs what happened in a way that will appeal to historians, students, and scholars with an interest in colonial, Southern, or Native American studies, and to general readers. Piker is too good a historian to presume he can write the first-person feelings of people long dead. He's a good enough historian to find the facts of their different perspectives, dilemmas, goals, and choices, and reveal each in third-person prose as satisfying as a good novel. The questions of what separates a soldier's work from murder, and the politics and human feelings that can fan or douse an accusation, are live ones for any time. The author unfolds a fourfold tale of British colonials becoming Americans, separate nations becoming Indians, the conflicting goals of authorities and ordinary people, and the range of tales we tell as truth. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)