All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

 

Oh, gawds, this novel starts as a bit of a mess and wraps up like someone who read too much Naturalistic fiction and decided to go with not one but two downbeat endings. Good work, podcaster and ghostwriter, good work! (And good job, ghostwriter, getting your name on the title page!) This novel is like the thematic opposite of I Have Some Questions for You, in that it's (at lesat in part) written by someone who does true crime podcasts (among others, including at least about the "supernatural" so there's clearly no limiting herself the the true) so there's no questioning the role of the media and journalists in the mangling of facts and stories and reputations, there's just a reporter following one bad conclusion after another on the way to a "twist" ending (that's also at least one of the downbeat ones). Amusingly, this novel doesn't make the media that cover murders look any better, really, than some of the other novels I've read that were more explicitly dubious about the matter; I'm pretty sure that's not intentional--there doesn't seem to be that level of clue available toe the authorship team, here.