A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson was published in 2021.
Our Sleuth: Pippa Fitz-Amobi is a high school senior who decides to investigate the murder-suicide of two former students for her senior project.
The Setting: We’re in Fairview, Connecticut, in 2019.
The Premise: Five years ago, popular girl Andie Bell, 17, went missing. A few days later, her boyfriend, Sal Singh, 18, walked into the woods and committed suicide. Most everyone in town believes Sal killed Andie and Sal’s family members have become pariahs as a result. But Pippa is skeptical. While she didn’t know Sal well, he was always kind to her and she’s having trouble believing he’s a killer. So for the required school project in her senior year, she decides to re-open the case and prove Sal’s innocence.
My Take: I fell hard for Pippa, the “good girl” of the title, who is smart, studious and sarcastic, and for her warm-hearted family and friends (well, mostly). The author uses a mix of third-person narrative and first-person epistolary storytelling, giving us Pippa’s transcribed interviews with police, press and others as she begins digging into the past. Needless to say, some people aren’t happy with Pippa’s investigation and she soon encounters a bevy of unsavory characters, including a racist journalist, a drug dealer and a young rapist. But there’s also a sweet relationship growing between Pip and Sal’s younger brother, Ravi, as events rush to a surprising finish.
As a writer, I’m intrigued by how the author mixed up the storytelling format in such a seamless way. I don’t always like epistolary additions — inserting a letter, email, text or other document — because I think it can awkwardly stop a story. Here, though, it works well.
Opening Lines:
Pip knew where they lived.
Everyone in Fairview knew where they lived.
Their home was like the town’s own haunted house; people’s footsteps quickened as they walked by, and their words strangled and died in their throats. Shrieking children would gather on their walk home from school, daring one another to run up and touch the front gate.
Heads Up: References to a rape that occurs off the page and an animal is harmed, also off the page.
Of Note: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is classified as a young adult novel because most characters are high school students. So are the two sequels Good Girl, Bad Blood and As Good as Dead.
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