Shawn Lawrence Otto is a screenwriter, novelist, and science advocate who wrote and co-produced the movie House of Sand and Fog, which was nominated for three Oscars. His novel Sins of Our Fathers, a literary thriller, is a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Otto is also the producer of the US Presidential Science Debates between Barack Obama and his opponents Mitt Romney and John McCain, and author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, which won the Minnesota Book Award. He lives in Minnesota, in a house he designed and built with his own hands.

Sins of Our Fathers is a literary thriller about crime. It tells the story of an arson inside an embezzlement inside an assault inside a banking scheme, all the way down to the core of the book, which is an unflinching look at America’s original sin: five hundred years of physical and spiritual violence against Native peoples. Crimes that made our country. In this selection, Otto reads from Chapter 2. Protagonist JW, an expert on banking in Indian country, is returning home.