A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Book Review
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
From Goodreads: The case is closed. Five years ago, schoolgirl Andie Bell was murdered by Sal Singh. The police know he did it. Everyone in town knows he did it.
But having grown up in the same small town that was consumed by the murder, Pippa Fitz-Amobi isn’t so sure. When she chooses the case as the topic for her final year project, she starts to uncover secrets that someone in town desperately wants to stay hidden. And if the real killer is still out there, how far will they go to keep Pip from the truth?
This book has been on my radar for almost a whole year now. I first heard about it at YALC last year, when the author was doing a really cool ARC drop. Basically, you had to try and find her in the convention hall and then you got an ARC. BUT, the proof came without the ending, so people were dying to know who the murderer was [pun one thousand percent intentional].
So yes, big hype. I loved the concept of it, and since I enjoyed Truly Devious but thought it was a little bit unrealistic, I was curious to see if AGGGTM had found an innovative way around the problem of a main character who is still in high school.
The first thing that struck me about Jackson’s book is the little bits of evidence dotted through the text. I loved having the excerpts of interviews, the text messages, the letters and things. It made me feel involved, because I was trying to piece together the same evidence.
Pippa was a decent main character. Sometimes, I thought she was a little too naive, and there were some moments that kind of beggared belief, but I liked how determined she was, and how she thought everything through. I think the fact that she was working to solve a closed-case murder also said a lot about her character, and it meant I was cheering for her from the first page. The other characters were also well fleshed out. I thought they all had good motives for what they were doing, and they all felt rounded. They all had their own stuff going on outside Pippa’s investigation, which added a lot to the tension.
The whole school project angle is handled pretty well too. One of the problems I had with Truly Devious is that the main character had access to a load of police evidence [I know the character in that novel was looking at a cold case from decades before, but then some crimes started happening in the present day and she was allowed access to all sorts of stuff that police would have definitely kept from a high school student, especially one who was a potential suspect]. Pippa gets a lot of her evidence by talking to people, and I suppose the whole ‘the police had a suspect. They believed it was him. He killed himself and they considered the case closed’ thing makes it much easier to believe she could discover things an expert might have missed. There were a few moments when I did a half eye-roll, but in all honesty, I think it’s maybe just one of those things that comes with this genre, especially in YA. There are always certain moments in a crime thriller novel where you have to suspect a certain amount of disbelief to just enjoy the book.
The writing style was fun and quirky, and it helped me race through the book really fast. I was excited to keep finding out new things, to pore over the scraps of evidence alongside Pippa. And I didn’t expect it to end the way it did. The twists and turns were sometimes mind-blowing, and I was keen to see how it panned out.
Overall, I’m giving A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder:
I thought the book was quirky and gripping, and although it is somewhat similar to other novels I’ve read recently, I thought the bits of evidence and twists were very unique and kept me hooked to the very last page. If you’re a big fan of murder mysteries, it’s a book I’d thoroughly recommend.
Has anyone else read this book already or plans to? What do you all think of it? Let me know in the comment section down below ❤
