BOOK REVIEW: All Good People Here

You can’t ever know for sure what happens behind closed doors.

Everyone from Wakarusa, Indiana, remembers the infamous case of January Jacobs, who was discovered 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 feeling 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 uncle after he is diagnosed with early-onset dementia, she feels like she’s walked into a time capsule. Wakarusa is exactly how she remembers—genial, stifled, secretive. Then news breaks about five-year-old Natalie Clark from the next town over, who’s gone missing under circumstances eerily similar to January’s. With all the old feelings rushing back, Margot vows to find Natalie and to solve January’s murder once and for all.

But the police, Natalie’s 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 January’s killer still be out there? Is it the same person who took Natalie? And what will it cost to finally discover what truly happened that night twenty years ago?

Twisty, chilling, and intense, All Good People Here is a searing tale that asks: What are your neighbors capable of when they think no one is watching?

Spoiler Free:

With a rating of 4.08 on GoodReads.com and a 4.6 on Amazon, Ashley Flowers’s new book All Good People Here has definitely gained the attention of readers all across the country.

Set in the small town of Wakarusa, Indiana, when city-journalist Margot Davies returns home after twenty-years to take care of her uncle whose dementia has continued to worsen, her first fear is what man she’ll encounter when she arrives. Will he remember her? Will he be himself? The kind loving one that took her in after her parents lacked the resources to be the parents they should’ve been. But later Margot realizes her uncle isn’t what would make her heart constrict her breathing, it’s the news about a missing five-year-old Natalie Clark from the next town over and the chilling similarities to six-year-old January Jacobs’s case, her neighbor and friend from years ago. Revamped with a new hunger to find January’s killer who has escaped judgement all these years, Margot must dive deeper into the people of the town in Wakarusa, all the good people in Wakarusa; except they can’t all be good? Can they?

Being a fan of Ashley Flowers and her Crime Podcasts Crime Junkies and The Deck, I was really excited to get my fingers (or more so my digital fingers for I’ve been converted to the modern kindle age) on this book. The entirety of this book kept my attention. I felt a necessity to comb through each page and chapter carefully to fully understand the details of the two cases (January’s and Natalie’s) and maybe even try to figure it out before the last page. Written with two timelines and two perspectives, this piece gives a wider range of knowledge of the town and the people involved in the two disappearances. Flowers throws curve balls in each chapter keeping you from figuring out the truth until the very last chapter.

Spoiler Full:

Spoilers! Spoilers!

I’m serious!

Read at your own discretion!

Wow you’re brave.

Okay, sometimes I like to spoil things for myself too, maybe we could be friends one day.

Alright, you’ve been warned.

Here I go.

I have some thoughts like I always do about books, because if I didn’t have thoughts, I wouldn’t be writing book reviews. I read this book in a few days and quite honestly, could’ve run through it in less had I not been so busy with my personal things. This piece reads easy so much so that as I neared the end, had my suspicions but nothing had been confirmed yet, I read passed my stopping time finishing it and got to making dinner a little later than we prefer to eat. I mean, the point is that dinner got made. That we got fed, right? As much as I want to jump to the end and spoil the ending, I’ll be gracious and walk through the novel with you.

The piece starts in 1994 in Krissy’s point of view. This chapter was one that set the scene of the town, the people, and the behaviors within and if you’ve been raised in the south or possibly a small town in which everyone knows everyone, this felt very accurate. I even highlighted the sentence,

“the Wakarusa gossip chain would flap their jaws, chewing the tidbit over so thoroughly that by the time they’d finally spat it out again the Truth was misshapen and unrecognizable, warped into the Story.”

It’s such a beautiful line, that at this point in reading not only did I feel like this book would be enjoyable to read for its poetic tone and oversight into the characters, I felt like I knew what kind of people we were dealing with here. Because let’s be honest, when I’m reading a crime thriller book, I’m solving it alongside the main character- in this case- Margot.

I enjoyed the structure of going back and forth between the 1994 Krissy POV and the 2019 Margot POV. Not that the characters themselves had parallels, but the stories within them aligned. With that, early on the reader discovers Margot’s history of reporting of child abuse or murder cases and her lack to stay objective within her pieces. We quickly find out about the Polly Limon case and how that murder case aligns with certain aspects within the January Jacobs case. The reader is also given insight into Margot’s inability to separate the two cases as two separate journalistic pieces but instead focuses on the similarities and believes they're connected.

Throughout the piece, Margot thinks often about the Limon case as well as Natalie Clark's, one that pushed her into reporting on child cases. Margot head dives into January's with blinders on. Knowing the plot of the story, it is understandable to have January’s case hold a higher regard to Margot since it is personal, but in the way that Margot drove to see Jace or interview Elliot Wallace’s sister, she never took that extent with the people surrounding Natalie. Was it because she felt she could've done more before?

The piece does a really good job in keeping the reader on their toes. I definitely had my suspicions of January's father and Officer Pete somehow being involved; then as some time passed her Uncle. Because multiple characters built the suspense and the theme of injecting themselves into a story to get their five minutes of fame, in the end, I felt shorted not knowing how those characters ended up.

Okay, her father never was involved and quite honestly I didn’t miss him, but what about Officer Pete? Jace? About Krissy’s lover Jodie? Elliot Wallace? Does he confess to them all except January? What about her uncle’s condition, does he just forget about her or does he see her bag on the futon in the office and remember she was coming home for a pizza dinner. It’s a bold move to leave the ending of a story up for interpretation and knowing Ashley Flowers and the work she does on Crime Junkies, all her listeners are well acquainted with an open-ended story. I just personally don’t agree with it in this written fiction format. With that, Margot being dragged down the stairs is different to how Bill killed January and doesn’t lend to a “oh I know what he’s going to do next” thought process. This is because in the story we're told how January was found and not how the person (her father) excatly killed her. If anything, because its different and more progressed, the question of what he will do to Margot is so high up on the list of thoughts roaming in my mind.

Lastly, I want to address the similarities between the JonBenét Ramsey case because they are there and they are very similar. I even, when trying to describe this piece to my fiancé, was like “You know the JonBenet Ramsey case?” Of course he didn’t because he’s a normal person that doesn’t over analyze and obsess over crime cases, so therefore I was left to explain everything aloud to him- but still it's very similar. After I finished reading, I went online to see if anyone shared the same sentiment and many if not all made a note of it, even going as far to say this was a fanfiction on the case or Flowers’s own belief on what she thinks happened during that case. I wouldn’t go as far as saying those things, but I do understand where they are coming from, because from the first chapter I caught myself questioning Flowers’s originality. She’s read on and analyzed hundred of cases, all different, all unique and yet she ended up with a result of something that is compared to one of the most infamous child cases in the world. But as a rebuttal, a lot of people also compared it to the Madeline McCann and Caylee Anthony cases in which I could also see similarities. In the end, all child abduction cases will have similarities and structure. But let’s be honest, the dance recital in her two-piece nautical-themed costume...

In the end, I really enjoyed this piece and although I had some things I wanted more from Ashely, for a debut novel I was impressed with her ability to write so beautifully as well as include clues and case information while keeping the reader in the dark until the very end, although I do think she’s had some experience with that.

Ashley Flowers

Many people know Ashley Flowers from her award-winning, independent media and podcast company “audiochuck”. Or maybe more specifically many people know her voice on hit podcasts Crime Junkies, The Deck, Red Ball, and full Body Chills. Flowers has proven herself a force to be reckoned with having established the non-profit, Season of Justice, that single-handedly assists in cold cases by providing funding to law enforcement agencies and families.

Nonetheless, Ashley Flowers knows how to captivatingly tell a story and keep an audience’s attention. It was only appropriate that her next business venture would be into the world of publishing. And with the help of Alex Kiester, author of The Truth About Ben and June, her vision finally became a reality. Her debut novel All Good People Here, dedicated to her “Crime Junkies”, has been advertised, talked about, and once advanced copies were released, raved about. It was only fitting I would sink my teeth into the highly anticipated novel being a crime junkie myself.