Book Review: All Good People Here

By: Hanna Young

All Good People Here, a debut mystery novel for Ashley Flowers, host of the CrimeJunkie podcast, left readers wondering what plot twist would happen next. The story is set between two different time periods, 1994 and 2019, in Wakarusa, Indiana. This book’s continuous twists and turns make everyone seem suspicious; no one is safe from the rumor mill that is Wakarusa.

Margot Davies is a true crime journalist who comes back to her hometown of Wakarusa to take care of her ailing uncle; however, she doesn’t realize that coming back would be like stepping into a time capsule. When Margot was six years old, her childhood best friend and neighbor, January Jacobs, was murdered, and the culprit was never found. Coming back to Wakarusa after all those years of away throwing her right back into the mystery surrounding January’s murder. Especially when another young girl, Natalie Clark, goes missing under mysterious circumstances in the next town over. Margot spirals into what-ifs about a connection between the cases and finds herself deep in a rabbit hole. The farther Margot digs into the case, though, the more secrets she finds.

While the twists and turns left me wondering what was gonna happen next, my attention was drawn toward similarities from other notorious true crime cases. There were almost too many similarities; anyone with a set of true crime knowledge would be able to make the connection between famous cases that this book seems to have a resemblance to. Some of the characters were very underdeveloped, and I felt that they needed more to transform them from good characters to great ones. The book did seem to keep me on my toes, though, and the big plot twists that came my way were still surprising.

Overall, I would give this book a 4/5 while I found some shortcomings, it did not fail to entertain me.