Books & Audiobooks
The name Ashley Flowers will be familiar to you if you’re a podcast fan. As the founder and co-host of Crime Junkie, she and Brit Prawat essentially wrote the script for true crime podcasts, which have flourished into an enormous market. Flowers started her career as a volunteer for Crime Stoppers Indiana, where she pitched the idea of a podcast to help push unsolved cases to the general public. Today, Crime Junkie is a monster in the industry and has actually led to real crimes being solved decades after they happened.
In 2022, Flowers ventured into a very different industry with her debut mystery thriller All Good People Here, written in collaboration with Alex Kiester. It became a New York Times best seller and sits at the top of my personal list of favourites in the genre. Filled with unexpected twists and turns, Flowers proved that her talents far outstretch the podcast studio. This month we received Flowers and Kiester’s second novel The Missing Half. I had high expectations for this follow-up, and I’m happy to say that each one was exceeded!
The story follows Nicole “Nic” Munroe. In her mid-twenties, she’s been working at the same family restaurant since high school living in a tiny apartment and subjected to biking around town after a DUI put her driver’s license on suspension. For the past seven years, Nic has been trying to keep her head above water after the disappearance of her big sister Kasey. When a woman named Jules Connor shows up unexpectedly at her job asking questions about Kasey, she can’t get away from her fast enough. That is until Jules reveals that her own sister Jenna also went missing that same summer.
The two women begin to share notes and decide to take the dead-end investigation into their own hands to finally figure out what happened to their sisters. Along the way Nic discovers secrets about the sister she thought she knew better than anyone and questions everything about the past. She must confront the deepest, darkest parts of her memory and face the day that changed the course of her life forever. This novel is unapologetically gritty, immensely clever, and will keep you on the edge of your seat for every page. After All Good People Here, I suspected that The Missing Half may present some unexpected twists and that I might be able to detect what was going to come. Never in my wildest dreams could I have done so. Without spoilers I’ll just say that the final twist of the story will change everything.
This novel was everything I could have hoped for and more. I would highly recommend it to any mystery fan!