Author: Ashley Flowers
Published: 2022
Rating: 3/5
If you’re a fan of true crime podcasts, then you have heard the name Ashley Flowers. Recently, the podcaster and producer has taken her talents to the publishing world and released her first novel, which I added to by to-be-read list as soon as she announced it on her podcast.
Told from two different points of view in two different timelines twenty-five years apart, All Good People Here centers on the unsolved murder of six year old January Jacobs. Unsurprisingly, the well-written prose is tight and delves into the murder investigation with a journalist protagonist who just so happens to have to lived across the street from January and been her friend.
Margot Davies has returned home to a small town after pursuing a journalism career to take care of her Uncle Luke, who has dementia. While working remotely, another little girl is murdered in a nearby town and Margot is assigned to write about the crime. However, she can’t resist the temptation to try to link this new and seemingly unrelated murder to that of January so many years ago.
Things go awry for Margot when she is fired by her newspaper. She begins her own investigation into both murders in the hopes writing a story that will be her comeback. The reader is taken along for the investigation, while Flowers uses flashbacks to 1994 to give the reader insight as to what really happened on the night of January’s death.
This book is relatively short at just over three hundred pages, and that’s the problem with it. The conclusion had more loose ends than a fringe dress and was disappointing after such a long build-up. While I do like books that end in cliffhangers and leave the ultimate outcome to the readers’ imagination, this book left too many questions unanswered at the end to be satisfying.