'ALL GOOD PEOPLE HERE'.....NO GOOD BOOK HERE....(*)

 All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers (2022)

                With only days to till 2023, here's my nomination for one of the worst mysteries of 2022......

               Words almost fail me in describing what an utter waste of time this book was.

                Nobody, but nobody will strain themselves figuring out which notorious true crime case inspired this author. Yeh, big deal.....so what. The book at first duplicates what many people (including myself) have come to believe as the solution to that case, but it's painfully obvious the book only floated it out as a red herring.

             The book's actual big reveal also becomes painfully obvious before it lurches to its woeful conclusion.

           I imagine Ashley Flowers congratulating herself for the deliberately aggravating, obtuse ending she came up with.

            She'll get no congrats from me. It made me sorry I ever picked this book up and threw away hours of my life reading it.

           A worthless effort, fatally sabotaged by its own author with the year's most "You gotta be ****in' kidding me" ending.

           Annoying to the max. Avoid it. Don't squander so much a penny or a second of your time on it. 1 star (*).

NO PLAN B......REACHER TAKES NO PRISONERS.....BUT AT LEAST ONE PRISON......(***)

 No Plan B by Lee Child and Andrew Child (2022)    Having read only some of Lee Child's Jack Reacher thrillers (but not all of them) I'm in no way qualified to make a detailed comparison of "No Plan B" to the previous 26 novels in the series. 

               In dealing with this particular book, I only have the relatively few others I've read to compare it to. So here goes.....

              Yes, once again our wandering soldier-of-fortune, and all around righter-of-wrongs comes across, through no fault of his own, nefarious goings on that lead to a vast evil conspiracy. And once again, Reacher takes it upon himself to seek out or hunt down the guilty parties and deliver some punch-in-the-head Reacher-ized justice. 

              These villains got it comin' real bad......to start out with, they throw people under the bus. Literally. Ouch. 

              Not taking kindly to this sort of behavior, Reacher, like Willie Nelson, goes on the road again.....heading for an bloody showdown with Minerva, a corporation that buys up and runs prisons for profit. 

               Of course, you don't need to guess  the Minerv-ians up to all manner of horrific, vile stuff that makes them in immediate, desperate need of terminal Reacher-ization. 

               As soon as these slugs find out Reacher's on their trail, they deploy teams of hired goons to take him out before he ever wanders into their home town and Home Sweet Prison. 

               On his way to mash up the Minerv-eolas, Reacher leaves truck stops littered with broken beat up minions,,,,,,,which leads the Minervites to unleash their final weapon, a bruiser even bigger and heavier than the Reach himself (and I'm pretty sure Lee Child's used this trope before........setting up a Clash-Of-The-Titans between Reacher and some behemoth who's more than his equal)

              As if he doesn't experience enough troubles on this latest highway wander, Reacher must also deal with a troubled teen boy runaway and a separate set of shady characters with their own agenda....... who favor  immolating people they don't like with napalm. Ouch. 

              I'm sure that Reacher purists and completists will howl at the severe stretching of believability in play here, but who cares and why bother. I couldn't care less that a massive amount of foul, violent villainy will invariably rear its head every time Jack Reacher sticks his thumb out looking for a ride. 

               (And by the time he's ready to stick his thumb out for another ride, dozens and dozens of people involved in massive amount of foul, violent villainy will.....uh...end up rendered unavailable to commit further naughty things. Ever.)

                Why else would we pick up a Reacher book?  For the same reason we pick up a double beef Whopper.....it's tasty junk every time.   3 stars (***)

               

VIVIANA VALENTINE GETS HER MAN (GIRL FRIDAY #1)....A WISECRACKIN' GAL SUBS FOR HER P.I. BOSS (****)

 Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man by Emily J. Edwards (2022)  

                Anyone who loves those 1940's-1950's tough-as-nails big city Private Eye noir films needs to snap this one up right away. 

                 Welcome back to early 50's NYC, where Private Investigator Tommy Fortuna solves cases that involve the wealthiest of 'swells' and the seediest of lowlifes. And he depends on the eye catching help of  indispensable Gal Friday Viviana Valentine.....a crackerjack secretary, receptionist and when called upon, as savvy and relentless a P.I. as Tommy. 

                  Their latest client, no less than filthy rich Captain of Industry Talmadge Blackstone, wants a close eye kept on his beautiful daughter Tallulah, a freewheeling debutante always in the public eye. But then Tommy mysteriously goes missing and back at the office, Viviana stumbles upon a comatose victim of rt5W6Q2a severe beating.......and the poor guy was already facially disfigured even before left at death's door. 

                 So that gives?  Any of these strange events related? It's up to the plucky, suffer-no-fools Viviana to crack the case without her disappeared boss, but with the unlikely help of her boarding house gal pals.  For sure, she's got her hands full, fending off the increasingly suspicious police detective Lawson as well as an abusive ex-boyfriend who's taken to stalking and threatening her.   Viviana, however, takes no guff from anyone, even managing to befriend the world famous, but sweet and lonely Tallulah Talmadge. 

                    Plenty of private eye mystery fun unfolds, along with a flavorful evocation of hot summer nights in the Big Apple.  The plot thickens nicely, but not worry -  Viviana, with streetwise smarts and never far from a smart remark, will get to the bottom of things  and lay it all out for you. 

                   You'll guaranteed a breezy good time with this one and might end up counting the days until the next book in the series comes out. 4 stars (****)

'DAISY DARKER'....A CALAMITOUS CLAN GETS AGATHA CHRISTIE'D....TO DEATH (****)

 Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney (2022) 

             I'm tempted to say that everybody who adores Dame Agatha's locked room murder-fests like "And Then There Were None" would gobble this up like their favorite bag of buttered popcorn.....

             Then again, I'm not sure what Christie-ites will make of this book's jaw-dropping, eye-popping you-gotta-be-kiddin'-me Big Reveal.....virtually guaranteed to make you want to go back for a quick re-read to see how Alice Feeney pulled it off.....

              Everything's in place here for a bump-'em-off-one-by-one good time.

               A perfectly gorgeous, ominous isolated location.....'SeaGlass', a family mansion situated on its own little remote chunk of seaside, storm-tossed rock along the the Cornwall coast......only accessed when the tide's in.....(when it's out, you're stuck there for the night...)

              And stuck there for a long storm tossed night - the highly dysfunctional Darker family, brimming with acrimony, lifelong hatreds and disappointments, and terrible, toxic secrets.

              They're there to celebrate the 80th birthday of grand matriarch Nana Darker, a celebrated children's book author about to announce the terms of her will to her most undeserving family.

              This fractured gang includes her son Frank, a conductor-composer who's spent a lifetime on world tours, neglecting the raising of his now grown three daughters, Rose, Lily and Daisy....(also in attendance are all three daughters, Frank's long estranged ex wife Nancy, and Trixie, Lily's sweet, nerdy teen daughter -nothing at all like her vain, selfish mother)

               And you'd better believe everybody at this get-together comes equipped with their own unhappy backstories, especially our narrator Daisy, born with a weakened, damaged heart and never expected to live past late adolescence.)

               One more last unusual suspect shows up - Connor, the brooding local journalist who became a semi-adopted, unofficial addition to the Darker household since spending an equally tortured childhood with an abusive, widowed father. 

               So what could possibly go wrong here......heh, heh, heh.......

               In true Christie fashion......the body count commences and the survivors turn ever more fearful and desperate while the high tide and raging storm keeps them trapped in Seaglass for a very, very murderously long night. 

                And that's as far as I dare go with the set-up.......except prepare for a double-beef Whopper of a Big Reveal and an even more staggering twist......

                 How much you'll enjoy 'Daisy Darker' will depend entirely on how much you're willing to swallow of what Alice Feeney lays out for you......

                 Since I don't consider myself an absolute murder-mystery purist, I shook my head in amused amazement of being totally blind-sided by the way-out-there ambitiousness of this book's conclusion.  Couldn't care less about its upending of all the traditional tropes.....I still couldn't stop reading and felt entertained every step of the way.....so SQ says by all means, snuggle down with 'Daisy' on a cold winter night. 4 stars (****).