All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

February 6, 2024

All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

After years away, Margot returns to her home town to care for her Uncle Luke. The day after she arrives, a child goes missing, and the case is eerily familiar to the case of a six year old girl who went missing in 1994 when Margot was growing up. The little girl happened to live across the street from Margot's aunt and uncle and was Margot's best friend. Twenty years later, Margot is sure that the two events are linked and sets out to discover who is responsible.

This was just okay. I am a fan of Flowers' podcast Crime Junkie, so I was interested in reading her mystery. I am usually a sucker for missing person stories, especially when set in small towns (I love ID's Murder in the Heartland series), but this one missed the mark. The story is based not-so-loosely on the Jon-Benet Ramsey case - the little girl in the novel who went missing in 1994 participates in child beauty pageants, the parents are wealthy and immediately suspected, and there is no real resolution to the case. As other readers have noted, the ending (or non-ending) was disappointing. I think I'll stick to her podcast, which really is outstanding. 

Child beauty pageant queens - they're six, not sixteen

Hell's Princess by Harold Schechter

November 10, 2019

Hell’s Princess:  the Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men by Harold Schechter

Belle Gunness of Laporte County, Indiana, was a notorious serial killer known as the Lady Bluebeard.  She would place classified advertisements in Norwegian language newspapers in the Midwest, seeking single men to come and help her run her large farm (oh, and bring all your money, too).  Once the men arrived at the Gunness farm, Belle would rob and murder them, dismembering the bodies and burying them in her pigsty.  Since she weighed around 300 pounds and wasn’t a pretty woman by any stretch of the imagination, it’s surprising how many men were taken in by Belle (the photo on the cover of the book actually bears a resemblance to Lizzie Borden - see the photos below).  While it is unknown exactly how many men Belle murdered, at least 14 of her victims were identified, and there may have been dozens more.

When one of her victim’s brothers notified her that he was coming to her farm to search for his brother, her farmhouse conveniently burned down.  Her children’s bodies were all found inside along with a headless woman’s body.  Even though he never found her head, the local sheriff decided that it was indeed Belle and pronounced her dead, but many people believed she had escaped.  For years afterward, there were sightings of Belle all over the country.

The first half of the book is fascinating, as it recounts Belle’s background and her history as a serial killer, but unfortunately, the last half of the book is mainly speculation about what happened to Belle, and whether or not she really died in the house fire (seems unlikely).  There are comparisons to other serial killers of the age such as the Bender family in Kansas who lured wealthy travelers to their deaths, or "what if" Belle had attracted a fellow serial killer with her ads and which one would have killed the other one first.  More text is spent on the mythology that grew up around Belle, and the industry that sprang from her story (pamphlets, stage dramas, ballads, etc.).  Well researched but I lost interest soon after Belle disappeared/died.

                                                              Lizzie Borden