All Good People Here: A Novel

Author: by Ashley Flowers

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Publication date: 08/16/2022

Pages: 320

Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

Estimated delivery time: 7 days

Armchair detectives, this book has your name on it. Disappearances, unsolved murders, justice — this thriller has it all. As with a true crime podcast, there’s no lack of wanting to hear and read such stories. Unpleasant, likely so, but when well written, as is the case of All Good People Here , we are allowed to skate that line of imagination and reality. Because don’t all of us just really want it to work out in the end? Authors such as Flowers help us with that hurdle.

In the propulsive debut novel from the host of the #1 true crime podcast Crime Junkie , a journalist uncovers her hometown’s dark secrets when she becomes obsessed with the unsolved murder of her childhood neighbor—and the disappearance of another girl twenty years later.

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?