Review: All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

Author: Ashley Flowers
Edition: eARC
Publisher: Bantam (August 16, 2022)
Genre: Adult, Thriller

Synopsis

My review of All Good People Here

All Good People Here is a gripping debut with many layers and even more secrets — nothing is as it seems in this small town thriller.

Trigger Warnings: dementia, mention of death by suicide, domestic abuse, violence, kidnapping, miscarriage, murder, death of a child and sexual assault

I received a free digital eARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review

Threads, Twists, and Layers

All Good People Here features one of my favourite narrative structures in thrillers: a dual timeline. Shifting between the time around January’s murder and the present, we are thrown back and forth, both timelines informing our view of the other. In my humble opinion, Ashley Flowers does this masterfully.

The hallmark of a good thriller for me is this: how much can the author give away to allow us to guess along and still be surprised, yet make it all line up? The dual timeline definitely helps here as we are always thinking about January’s case from two perspectives, gathering different insights from both the past and present. Ultimately, this made for a really interesting reading experience.

Jumping back and forth between relevant moments in the past helped peel back the many layers of this book bit by bit. Slowly, a picture of the events surrounding January’s death starts to form. But if you think you figured out the truth? There’s a twist that will send your brain spinning in a new direction.

Personally, I felt all the twists and turns were organic and made sense within this story. They feel earned and representative of how complicated real crime investigations are. The truth is rarely as simple as we would like it to be and All Good People Here reflects this beautifully.

Small Town Secrets

If like me, you are from a small town, All Good People Here will feel familiar in some ways. Wakarusa is a close-knit community, but it’s also a judgmental one. Appearances and reputations matter above all else. The devil works fast but the small town rumour mill works faster.

This tension between appearances and the sometimes ugly truth behind them is the driving force of this thriller. As the plot unfolds, we see just how much the tragic events of the past and present are influenced by this need to conform to an unspoken community standard. On the flip side, Wakarusa’s commitment to knowing their neighbour’s business also means that everyone knows something — a fact that is helpful for Margot’s mission to uncover the truth.

A Compelling Main Character

Speaking of Margot, I absolutely loved her as our main character and present narrator. She’s smart and tenacious but equally haunted by her past. When we meet her at the beginning of the book, she’s afloat, treading water in a life riddled by problems she feels responsible for.

Margot is still haunted by the night of January’s murder. She never quite got over the fact that it could’ve been her. Throughout the book, this manifests in two ways. Firstly, Margot is driven to get justice for January and finally find out what happened. Secondly, she struggles with obsessive thoughts and moments of compulsive behaviour. To me, these small moments of Margot circling back to the same thoughts and behaviours felt like a realistic take on how that kind of trauma would affect someone. I also appreciated that it was subtle, almost understated, simply woven into the fabric of who Margot is as a person. Ultimately, I found Margot to be incredibly easy to love and care about. Someone give this woman a hug, please.

Emotional Depth and Stakes

One aspect of her story that took me by surprise was seeing her uncle Luke’s dementia play out. Their relationship broke my heart. Seeing him gradually lose parts of himself was emotionally challenging for me to read about and I really felt for both him and Margot. Overall, I think this subplot added a lot of emotional depth and connections for Margot, who is otherwise a pretty solitary character. Additionally, it also created plenty of tension. Margot is constantly having to choose between the investigation and taking care of Luke — and she never feels like she made the right choice.

In general, I appreciated the entire cast of characters Ashley Flowers presents us with. She knows how to capture the essence of a character and make them feel real and compelling. I would happily read a whole series of novels about many of the characters we meet, they all seem so interesting!

A Divisive Ending

Having talked to other readers and reading reviews, the ending seems to be divisive. It certainly is an open end, leaving Margot’s fate undecided. Personally, it felt a little sudden but I appreciate an author for making a gutsy choice — and this is definitely one of those.

While it’s most likely intended to leave readers hanging for more, I also felt that it reflects our expectations of stories, especially those about crime. We look for a neat ending, for the bad guy to be brought to justice and for our heroes to persevere, unharmed. But that’s not how reality works, very few things are this simple. And while we get to know what happened to January, we don’t get the satisfaction of wrapping up Margot’s story with a neat little bow.

Overall…

All Good People Here is a fast-paced adult thriller that was engaging and accessible. Ashley Flowers sure knows how to tell a story!

This book is for you if…

…you like thrillers with journalists as the main characters
…you are looking for a book that has dual timelines and a complex mystery

A post you might also enjoy: My Review of A Killer by Design