Nothing seemed awry the morning that five-year-old Artis Chester climbed into her father’s plane: this was simply their usual Saturday bonding. But moments after they take off into the crystal blue sky, the plane plummets to the ground, leaving Artis with a broken body--and without a father.

This tragedy would be enough to shape any young life, but Artis’s world is further turned upside down when, shortly thereafter, the IRS arrives to seize all her family’s possessions. Lamar Chester had always had an air of mystery about him, but now her mother won’t say a word. He’d been a dashing commercial pilot, settling his family in a palatial estate in Georgia, amassing a collection of boats, cars, a private plane and even a group of islands in the Bahamas. But Artis, as a young child, had thought little of it before the accident.

It would take years for Artis to begin to uncover the truth: Lamar had made his multi-million-dollar fortune smuggling drugs between the Bahamas and Florida in the 70s and 80s, and many of his compatriots believed that he had been covertly working for the Feds. As more and more details emerge, it becomes clear that the plane crash that took Lamar’s life was not a simple pilot error but perhaps a plot by high-ranking government officials to cover up crimes that far exceeded Lamar’s drug smuggling.

In the page-turning adventures of No Ordinary Bird this critically acclaimed memoirist vividly chronicles her father’s outsized life, including his rise from poor farm boy to one of America’s most prolific drug smugglers, probes for the first time the suspicious circumstances of his death, and ultimately offers a compassionate, clear-eyed look at the people left in his wake.