All Good People Here

 All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers, 336 pages.

Margot Davies has been haunted her whole life by the murder of January Jacobs, her childhood neighbor and friend who was murdered when they were six. When she returns to her uncle's house in Wakarusa, Indiana, she finds that very little has changed. Soon after she arrives another little girl in the next town over is murdered, and the cases look similar to her reporter's eye. As she begins to investigate she finds plenty of secrets in the quiet town, and she'll need to find even more to solve a murder that's twenty years cold.

I quite liked this twisty mystery. It did a really good job having a mystery that was easy enough to follow (and to often get exactly one or two steps ahead of), but was not so obvious that it offered no surprises. It's the kind of book that makes me feel a little clever reading it. Although I will admit that by the end there are so many twists that the series of events twenty years ago begins to feel extremely improbable (I won't elaborate for spoilers reasons). I found the ending frustrating, and overall found Flowers' second book a more compelling portrayal of small town life, but I still thought this was a really interesting book, and an engaging mystery.

Knots and Crosses

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin  256 pp.

Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh Police suffers from what we now call PTSD from his time in Britain's elite SAS. He has never talked of his experiences to anyone. Now the policeman is receiving mysterious crank letters that he is ignoring. He is also part of the investigation into a series of murders of young girls. He soon discovers that the next target is his own daughter, Samantha. Eventually a connection between a horrific episode in his SAS career and the serial killings is made and he must race the clock to find his daughter before she too is killed. There is a side plot involving Rebus' stage hypnotist brother and a relentless new reporter who wants to bring down the Rebus brothers. This is a police procedural with interesting twists and a satisfying mystery.

The Story of the Lost Child: The Fourth and final Neapolitan Novel / Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein, 473 p.

Elena returns to Naples with her children.  She returns for a man, but in the end stays for Lila, as she takes a flat in Lila's building.  We see the two women go through the ordinary events of middle age -  raising children, burying parents, drifting away from lovers - and the not-so-ordinary - the murder of childhood friends, the continued impact of organized crime on day-to-day life, and the disappearance of a child.  There are unsolved mysteries here that pull you through the text.  In the end, Elena and Lila felt like my friends, and I hated to say good-bye to them.  An especially gorgeous ending.