Grab the Lapels

All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

I’m truly surprised I read All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers because it breaks my #1 bookish rule: I don’t read books in which the synopsis is mainly about a missing person and seeeecrets. I’ll be so happy when this trend is over. Anyway, Ashley Flowers is from the area where I live, and my mom’s library book club was going to read All Good People Here, so we added it to our mini book club, and here we are. Set in Wakarusa, Indiana, Flowers’s novel is located in a place I’ve been many times. In fact, they’re famous for their jumbo-sized jelly beans.

All Good People Here basically means that small town people would never do anything bad. In fact, one character says, “Seems like a nice Christian family to me…” which is Midwestern code for straight, white, married, has children, churchgoing. The novel is told from two points of view: Krissy starting in 1994 and Margot in 2019. Krissy married Billy and had twins, aged six, a boy and a girl. One night, the girl, January, is missing and some graffiti is painted on the wall, words that never added up to anything for me. She’s found dead. As the novel unfurls, Flowers will point to the twin brother, the mother, anyone who has attended a dance recital, and a stranger, among others, as the killer. Because you know. Everyone has secrets.

Margot is twenty-five and has just moved from Indianapolis to Wakarusa to care for her uncle, aged fifty, who has dementia. His wife died the year before, and now that he’s alone, everything is worse. Margot, a reporter, convinces her boss at the paper (or is it website? do people still get papers?) to let her work remotely (how would that work?? If you’re reporting, what are you going to report on from Wakarusa, home of the giant jelly beans???). Anyway, a girl in the nearby super-Amish town of Nappanee is killed, and Margot can’t let it go that the death of January in 1994 is just like the death of this girl, even though the situations have nothing in common other than both girls were six. The local bartender agrees with Margot for a very good reason: “We’re only big enough for one childnapper round these parts.”

Margot’s editor demands she stop pushing an agenda (this is not the first time Margot claimed a a little girl’s death is just like January’s), but Margot fails to listen and loses her job. She proceeds to spend the rest of the novel trying to prove January’s death and the new murder are linked, constantly leaving her uncle at home despite him having a tendency to wander off and point his shotgun at people. Meanwhile, Margot’s meager savings drains away for take-out meals and traveling to hours away without a lead to go on. At one point, she’s in Chicago where she pays for a hotel and starts Googling the person she wants to interview. It’s Chicago. Would you drive to Sydney or Vancouver or London and then Google someone in the hopes of finding their address?

I want to say this was the point during which the novel stumbled and fell down, but that would be suggesting it didn’t have two left feet to begin with. Nothing adds up or makes sense. We get ominous lines that make your head say Dun dun DUUUUN!!! like, “Krissy couldn’t have known then everything that kiss would lead to. If she had, she never would have done it. If she had, she would have run fast in the opposite direction.” By the end of the novel, we learn pretty much everyone had their fingies on the crime scene the night January was killed because Flowers wants to keep you guessing, but boy does she work hard to make everything as dramatic as possible. At one point, I had an important relationship figured out and then thought I was wrong all because one character had the X, but they used to call that person Y back in high school. It’s not even a good nickname. It’s two different Midwestern white people names. That’s not how nicknames work.

As we discussed All Good People Here in my mini book club, which now includes Biscuit and my cousin Jordy(!), we lamented the overdramatic one liners there simply to seem ominous. It doesn’t work. It comes off as cheesy. One line actually reminded me of little Gage at the end of Pet Sematary. And he’s possessed! These are supposed to be real, alive children, for corn’s sakes.

19 comments

    • Fixed that for you 🤣 Thanks for the compliment! I reassessed the way I write reviews. It’s been a long process. I might write a post about it 1) to share some insight from my end and 2) I’m doing a presentation on how to write book reviews in July.

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  2. I think your adverse reviews are my favourite. Keep them coming.

    (My mum still gets the daily paper delivered on her front lawn every morning. But then, she’s 94, probably a bit late to change).

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  3. LOLLLLLLL I love when you refer to ‘fingies’ because I do that with my kids, it’s such a fun word. Sigh, yes, this sounds like an unbelievable book. But always good to read your local literature! Please post a picture of a giant jelly bean in one of your upcoming life update posts, I would LOVE to see it

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  4. I am super interested in the giant jelly beans!

    I love a review that eviscerates a dumb thriller!

    And I actually do get our small town paper – otherwise I wouldn’t know anything going on in my county!

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    • A couple of folks have now mentioned still getting the newspaper. I’m so surprised! Even my Grandma Glady, who is 84, I believe gets her local newspaper on an app. I mentioned to Anne in a comment that the funny thing about the jumbo jelly beans is when you look at pictures of them, they just look like a bowl of jelly beans. There’s nothing there for scale!

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  5. I’ll be honest, I got distracted by the concept of jumbo jelly beans and went off to google how big they were. I did not know this was a thing.
    Anyway, I am happy to never read this book. Do you ever learn why the journalist is so obsessed with murdered 6 year olds?

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    • Replying to myself to say 1) reading the other comments I am enjoying how we are all stuck in the giant jelly beans and 2) my town has a local paper that I read in print every week. (It’s free, which helps.)

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    • We do learn why she’s obsessed. She actually lived across the street from the little girl who went missing and then was later found dead. She’s obsessed with this idea that a killer just stood in the middle of the street and looked at her house and her friend’s house and basically flipped a coin to decide who to kill. From my understanding, deaths of this fashion are done by someone that the victim knew. It’s not some guy standing on the street deciding who he should kill today.

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      • On the one hand, I could see how something like that happening in your vicinity at a young age would definitely leave a mark. On the other, you’re right, these situations rarely involve a stranger. I do remember hearing of a case where a guy basically picked a girl at random when she got off the school bus but I think it sticks out because that is so unusual.

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  6. Like Bill I did enjoy your review. You have such a fun way of writing them – both the positive and negative ones. I don’t think you have inspired me to read this, and I thank your expanded mini-book-club for taking one for the team.

    I really don’t know where to start with commenting on the content, but I will just say that Mr Gums still got the paper until we moved in April 2023. He had to learn how to do Sudokus online! That was the main drawcard for the paper in the end. He now sudokus online like a pro!

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    • I’m amazed at how many people in the comments mentioned still getting a physical newspaper. I haven’t even SEEN one in years. It used to be you would see them in the separate newspaper mailbox in front of houses or for sale in cafes. Cafes always had up signs about not leaving your paper behind for the next person to read because the publisher wants everyone to buy their own copy.

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