Book Review
Title: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Book 1) by Holly Jackson
Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Thriller
Rating: 5 Stars
The opening to A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder lays out a lot of information but the jist of it is that our protagonist, Pippa “Pip” Fitz-Amobi is doing a research project looking into the disappearance and presumed murder of Andie Bell. The murder was allegedly committed by her boyfriend at the time, Sal Singh but this is unconfirmed since Sal committed suicide but Pip doesn’t believe he committed the crime and wants to prove it. Her research project has guidelines and rules which she immediately breaks when she asks to interview Sal’s younger brother, Ravi which she has been forbidden from doing. Pip and Ravi live in the small town of Little Kilton so it is vital that she keeps her investigation under wraps for as long as she can otherwise she could be stopped. Pip’s first task is finding out the police’s version of events which isn’t hard since it is well documented and there is an hour and half time gap where they believe Sal murdered and disposed of Andie’s body although it was never found. However, some suspicion is cast on Andie’s father, Jason as Ravi reveals that she seemed to have a strained relationship with him and Sal believed she ran away to punish someone. Pip also notices in one of the press conferences before the suspicions on Sal were cast he refers to Andie in the past tense when everyone still believed she was alive and he is the first person on her persons of interest list. The opening was really interesting and I can’t wait to see where the investigation goes and what Pip uncovers about Sal since she appeared to have been close to him before his death.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, Pip seems to be building a solid foundation for her investigation which is interesting to follow especially as she interviews the people closest to both Andie and Sal. Seeing her with her friends, Cara and Lauren also reminds us that Pip is just a normal teenager without the resources of the police so we feel just as frustrated when she hits a dead end. However, after interviewing two of Sal’s friend, Max and Cara’s sister Naomi, she realises that someone is definitely lying about what Sal did that night as they have drastically different stories and while Pip understands there will be some differences as it was over five years ago these can’t be ignored. Coupled with Ravi’s comments about Naomi having feelings for Sal she makes her way on the persons of interest list along with Andie’s father. She hasn’t been able to get into touch with Millie or Jake yet so she moves onto Andie’s friends. Two of Andie’s closest friends at the time, Emma and Chloe yield some amazing information which she uses with the information she and Ravi got from Sal’s phone. There is a mysterious text on Sal’s phone to Andie about not talking to her until she stops but the question is stops what, but Pip learns from Emma and Chloe using covert methods that Andie was apparently seeing a mysterious older man who may have been supplying her with money in exchange at the same time she was dating Sal which would also explain why they weren’t sleeping together. However, Pip knows the money could have easily come from Andie’s father as she was aware he was having an affair at the time with the woman he has now married and Jason was aware his daughter knew of the affair. Things become a little darker when Pip and her friends are out camping and they are being watched by someone in the woods, while the boys chase the person they soon lose them but Pip finds an ominous note in her sleeping bag telling her to stop digging which only hardens her resolve to learn the truth.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, Pip is coming to learn that Andie wasn’t a very nice person, she learnt from Chloe and Emma that Andie was constantly running hot and cold with them and Sal but it gets much worse when Pip learns that Andie had a grudge against Naomi and Cara’s dad, Elliot Ward, a teacher at the school. Due to her close relationship with the family Pip asks Elliot about these comments and he explains that he learnt that Andie was bullying another girl in the school even posting an inappropriate video of her online and that he was supposed to tell the headmaster and Andie would have been expelled but he didn’t want her education to end so soon so he phoned her father to sort it out. Going back to Naomi she learns the girl was Natalie da Silva and the bullying was worse than this as when Nat got the lead role in a school play, Andie threatened to make rape accusations against her brother, Daniel so Nat dropped out but these rumours were never confirmed. Pip and Ravi pay a visit to Nat who is currently on tag due to her violent behaviour at university and lets slip that the threatening note the police thought Sal posted in Andie’s locker was actually written by her. They soon learn that her brother Daniel is now a police officer and has been since just before Andie went missing so it would be easy for him to tamper with evidence that pointed to himself or his siter adding the pair of them to Pip’s list of suspects. However, when she gets her hands on the transcript of Sal’s interview it doesn’t look good for him as he was evasive with the police over what he and Andie were fighting about at the time and Pip begins doubting herself but eventually comes to the realisation that someone would only warn her away from the case because she was on to something. In my opinion the Bell family is looking suspicious since Jason was interviewed and when Pip runs into Becca, the younger sister her behaviour especially regarding their father indicates they have something to hide.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, I was loving this book and I couldn’t wait to see what Pip had learned by the end of the book. After her dreadful aborted with Becca, Pip gets in touch with her former best friend, Jess Walker who confirms that Jason Bell was emotionally and verbally abusive to his wife and daughters which accounts for Andie’s bullying and Becca’s self-harm but it goes deeper than that. Max was closer to Andie than he let on and Pip confronts him about it since he also has a naked photo of Andie in his possession that he claims he found but I don’t buy that. However, he does tell Pip that Andie was dealing drugs to school kids and through current users she manages to find the name and number of the dealer, Howie Bower. She stakes out his dealing spot and witnesses him dealing to a school kid and takes pictures but she also witnesses Stanley Forbes, the journalist that bashed Sal and is dating Becca giving him money presumably because he is blackmailing him and stupidly decides to follow him home. There is uncovers things that make her phone Ravi for backup, when he arrives they realise he lives on the street where Andie’s car was found and his number plate matches the one Sal had saved in his phone. He must have learnt Andie was dealing which was the reason for their arguments and the reason Sal wasn’t speaking to her because he hated drugs. It is also the reason he didn’t tell the police because he was sure Andie was still alive and coming home so he didn’t want to get her in trouble with the police. Together they confront Howie who explains how long he was working with Andie and what they were selling and it seems that Max was a regular buyer of roofie from Andie which means there might be more going on her. He also tells them that Andie had a second phone which she kept hidden beneath a loose floorboard in her room so Pip plans to break into the Bell home to find it since there is a real possibility it is still in Andie’s room unless she had it on her when she went missing.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, things starting speeding up as we approach the climax of the novel. Together Ravi and Pip get into the Bell house but don’t find the burner phone but they do find Andie’s planner and work out her drug dealing code and they realise that at least 3 of the meetings must have been with her older secret guy because a local hotel has the same flooring in the photo Max has of Andie. When they visit the owner remembers Andie but doesn’t remember the man she was with because of her Alzheimer’s but it means that they are closer than ever now. On the way back they see Max talking to Howie and Pip realises he lied to her again which makes him the number one suspect now. Digging further into the drug connection Pip realises she has to get into Naomi’s Facebook and gets Cara to help her. Here she uncovers a picture for the night Andie disappeared and through some enhancing realises that the only person who could have taken the picture was Sal and the time of Naomi’s phone proves that Sal was telling the truth all along and his friends lied and took away his alibi and she wants to know why. She confronts Max and Naomi who are both are Cara’s house and they explain that on New Year’s Eve in 2011 Max drove them all home drunk, minus Sal as he was with Ravi and hit a man, they believed he was dead and fled the scene. However, the man survived and ended up in a wheelchair, that night when Andie went missing they all received a message telling them to delete all the pictures of Sal and upload the rest as normal and then to implicate Sal in the disappearance of Andie and they did. Naomi genuinely believes that the true culprit would be caught and Sal would be found innocent but then he died. Pip agrees not to go to the police but she needs to prove Sal’s innocence while protecting Naomi so she decides she is going to find the real killer and prove Sal’s innocence that way.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, things start to get real dark real fast. Pip and Ravi are looking into their leads in order to catch a killer as they speak to more people involved like Daniel da Silva but Pip is still getting threatening texts and messages and the latest one warns her that it is her final warning to drop the project and stop digging into Andie’s disappearance. Things get hard for Pip when her dog, Barney is essentially kidnapped and the person behind it blackmails Pip into destroying all her research to get her dog back. Pip does what the person asks of her only to learn Barney drowned and she knows the person killed her dog in retaliation for her investigation. While she tries to stop and get Ravi to stop as well by making him hate her, he sees straight through her and realises the only reason Pip would be acting this way is if someone was threatening her. Together they decide the best way forward is to appear like they’ve stopped investigating since they are sure the true killer’s identity is in the information they already have so they begin digging deeper. One night something clicks for Pip when she realises that the temporary phone number Naomi rung her off is so similar to the number in Andie’s planner and she knows it can’t be a coincidence. Pip realises that she has to check the printer to see if Naomi was the one sending her the threatening messages despite how much she doesn’t want to believe it so she heads over Cara’s house.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, everything finally came together and it didn’t come easily. Watching Pip struggle to make the final pieces come together was divine and it ends with four people getting arrested although I will let you speculate on who those four are as a couple of them came as a massive surprise to me. Honestly A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder was one of the best young adult mystery, thrillers I have read in a long time and I would highly recommend it. It has a slow start but once the tension and pace start to build it doesn’t stop until the dramatic conclusion and the small epilogue afterwards showing where the characters were after the events of the novel made me sad and happy for them at the same time and I can’t wait to read the sequel next month. Highly recommended!
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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