The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd. By Jeffery S. King (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998. Pp vii, 242. Acknowledgments, introduction, epilogue, notes, select bibliography, index. $28.00.) The area of western Missouri, northwest Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma known as the Ozarks has a long history of colorful characters. Unfortunately, many of them were on the wrong side of the law. Over a period of seventy years, from the 1860s through the early 1930s, this area produced many of the most famous outlaws in American history. Of all the Ozark area, that part which lay in what was then Indian Territory became the most famous for its bad men -and women too. The names read like an Old West hall of fame: the Dalton brothers, Bill Doolin and his gang, Cherokee Bill, Sam Starr, Henry Starr, Belle Starr and her daughter Pearl, who later became the most famous madam of the Fort Smith red light district, and Ned Christy. As the Wild West gave way to the twentieth century, a new generation of outlaws came on the scene. Although they now used automobiles instead of horses and automatic weapons instead of six-shooters, they could not escape the comparison with those who had gone before them. It is said that Clyde Barrow wanted to be thought of as a modern-day Jesse James, but the most likely candidate for that title was also the last really famous outlaw to come out of the Ozark region. He was a young man, born in Georgia and raised in the Cookson hills of eastern Oklahoma, named Charles Arthur Floyd. Charley's nickname to his family and friends around Sallisaw was Choc because of his fondness for the local Choctaw beer. It was later during his criminal career that someone gave him the moniker which he made infamous-Pretty Boy. Floyd has sometimes been overshadowed by some of his contemporaries, even though he was a much more successful bank robber than Clyde Barrow and survived and operated twice as long as either Barrow or the even more famous John Dillinger. There was a when the level of Floyd's activity dictated the insurance rates for banks in Oklahoma. Actually, Floyd was one of the few well-known gangsters of the 1930s to bridge the gap between the many small-time criminals who never made the big time and the well-organized independent operators who were also connected to large urban mobs. Floyd moved in both circles, and it was his connection to a Kansas City gang that ultimately did him in. Jeffery King is not the first to write about Floyd and his career, but he combines a detailed account of Pretty Boy's life with a level of documentation and references missing in earlier works. This makes his new book very informative to a casual reader coming to Pretty Boy Floyd's story for the first and also useful to the serious researcher who must be able to follow up and verify sources. …