halpal's Reviews > All Good People Here

I think the only people giving this book 4/5 stars are major Crime Junkie/Ashley Flowers fans and were just thrilled to be reading a book by her. Fans of crime fiction (or well-written fiction in general), however, are going to be pretty disappointed.

My first major issue with this book is the obvious parallels to the JonBenet Ramsey case. Others have mentioned this, but the plot really does read like JonBenet fanfiction with some minor details changed. I wouldn't have as much of a problem with this if the author were honest about what she was doing. But she instead billed this as an original, fictional story that her own brain came up with. I even double-checked my suspicions and re-read the JonBenet Ramsey case after finishing this book and was shocked to find even more details and parallels that made it into Flowers' story. All of this left a bad taste in my mouth. Something about it feels icky and unethical.

On top of that, the writing itself is quite poor. I'm not sure how best to describe it, other than 'elementary' or 'juvenile'. There's a lot of telling and hand-holding throughout the novel like the author is assuming the reader is too dumb to follow along or put two-and-two together. There's also no real...development? Most of what happens in the book is just the author saying "and then this happened, and then the character did this, and then this next thing happened, etc." The end result is that none of the characters' actions, or plot 'twists' that happen, make any sense at all. By the time I got towards the end, I found myself rolling my eyes (cue "sure Jan" meme) at most of what the narrator told me because I didn't believe anything she said.

There are many, many, many examples of this development issue. From the beginning, most of Wakarusa is convinced the Natalie & January cases are connected. Without any evidence, except that both girls were around the same age at the time they disappeared. 25 years apart. In different towns. I'm not sure whether Flowers just expected us to take her at her word, but it really just frustrated me because it didn't make any sense. Then there's the fact that Margot is supposed to be taking care of her uncle (who has early-onset dementia) but she'll just leave him for days at a time, even after he wanders out of the house and gets lost for hours. Again, make it make sense. I could go on, but I don't want to get into spoilers. With some proper character and plot development, some of these issues could've probably been resolved. But without it, you're just left scratching your head.

And then there's the ending. Yes, it sucks just as most other people have said it does. To me it felt like Flowers was trying to be profound - like this was her mic-drop moment that would leave her readers in awe of how incredible she is. All I could do was roll my eyes (again) and mosey over to goodreads to write this review. It just wasn't good and did not accomplish what she thought it was going to.

Phew, this was a long review. In truth I rarely write reviews and am not normally so vitriolic when I do. Without the JonBenet stuff, I would probably give this 2 stars. The book was mildly intriguing at certain points and, for a first novel, it wasn't a bad attempt. But the JonBenet stuff really annoyed me and made me less forgiving about the other nonsense. If you're a huge Ashley Flowers fan you might enjoy this book (emphasis on might). If you don't know who that is, you'd be better off skipping it.