Who Okayed This Book? | All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

Title: All Good People Here
Author: Ashley Flowers
Published: August 16, 2022
Genre(s): Mystery/Thriller
Page Count: 312
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

Everyone from Wakarusa, Indiana, remembers the case of January Jacobs, who was found dead in a ditch hours after her family awoke to find her gone. Margot Davies was six at the time, the same age as January—and they were next-door neighbors. In the twenty years since, Margot has grown up, moved away, and become a big-city journalist, but she’s always been haunted by the fear that it could’ve been her. And the worst part is, January’s killer has never been brought to justice.

When Margot returns home to help care for her sick uncle, it feels like walking into a time capsule. Wakarusa is exactly how she remembered: genial, stifled, secretive. Then news breaks about five-year-old Natalie Clark from the next town over, who’s gone missing under eerily similar circumstances. With all the old feelings rushing back, Margot vows to find Natalie and solve January’s murder once and for all.

But the police, the family, the townspeople—they all seem to be hiding something. And the deeper Margot digs into Natalie’s disappearance, the more resistance she encounters, and the colder January’s case feels. Could the killer still be out there? Could it be the same person who kidnapped Natalie? And what will it cost to finally discover what truly happened that night?

Everybody’s so creative! It seems obvious that being a true crime obsessed podcaster doesn’t, in and of itself, give you the necessary skills to write a successful novel…but Ashley Flowers thought she could do it anyway. All Good People Here is a study in self-indulgent maximalism, and the author badly needed an editor to curb her enthusiasm. You can practically feel Flowers writing the book and thinking to herself “if one red herring is good, then why not fifty?” The end result is a book that feels derivative and silly, as each far-fetched plot twist takes the story further and further into the realm of the ludicrous. This book is not exciting; it’s exhausting.

To begin with (and has already been rightfully pointed out by several other readers) the basic premise is a blatant JonBenét Ramsey copycat. The story is told by JonBenét’s…I mean, January’s childhood friend and neighbor, who is now a crime reporter forced to return to her hometown due to a family illness. And just as she arrives, another little dies in a town just a few miles away. So now we’ve got a decades-old cold case, and a brand new murder, and an overly involved millennial out to prove the two killings are connected.

What follows is an absolute nonsense of an investigation, lead by a bland protagonist of questionable competence. I cannot stress enough how utterly bananas the plot of All Good People Here becomes. For fun, I summarized the book for another person, and they lasted until I got to: “AND THEN the protagonist is grabbed off the street and kidnapped by fake JonBenét’s secretly murdered mother’s secret lesbian lover, who’s been writing the protagonist ominous notes for the past two weeks” at which point their brain imploded. (My own brain imploded at about that point as well, but I kept reading. For science.)

Finally, at the end of it all, the cold case is solved! The murderer is discovered and arrested. The protagonist makes her name as a world-class reporter. Justice is served, and all is right with the world.

…or is it?

Flowers simply could not control herself, and she tosses in one more twist before the abrupt and highly unsatifactory ending. It was too much nonsense after a book already stuffed to bursting with nonsense. Honestly, the lack of closure in the final chapter is less bothersome than the truly excessive storyline.

Note to everyone: just because you can cram your book full of twists, red herrings, and false leads doesn’t mean you should. When your approach to writing is “throw everything at the audience and see what sticks,” your story doesn’t look complex and sophisticated—it looks messy and deranged.

It seems to me that Flowers already had a successful career as yet another white woman breathlessly recounting heinous crimes for the entertainment of other white women. Why’d she have to waste trees with this atrocity?

Like…I mean. Seriously. “Kidnapped by your murdered best friend’s secretly murdered mom’s secret lesbian lover” is simply a bridge too far. TOO FAR, I say!