Book Review: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Absolutely amazing! A story that will make you never want to put it down.

Book CWs: For a list of content/trigger warnings, tropes, and representation found in this book, check out its page on BookTriggerWarnings.com!

Premise

Five years ago, Andie Bell disappeared. Everyone in town knows what happened: Sal Singh killed her. Following Sal’s confession and suicide, the cased is closed. End of discussion.

Or is it?

Pippa Fitz-Amobi has always believed that there was something off about Andie Bell’s disappearance. Sal was universally known to be the nicest guy around town– definitely not the murder-suicide type. So why was everyone so quick to point the finger?

When Pippa decides to re-examine the case as her senior project, she soon unravels a trail of lies, cover-ups, and deceit. Did Sal really kill Andie Bell all those years ago? And if not, who did? It’s up to Pippa to find out.

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Review (No Spoilers)

This book was wonderful. I read it for the “5 star prediction” prompt for Readathin and I am so happy that I chose correctly. After reading several YA mystery novels, I found myself growing tired of authors constantly “dumbing down” their protagonists in order to move the story forward. I too often would end up screaming at a main character to stop being so gosh darn foolish as I watched them make bad decision after bad decision. It wasn’t until I read The Inheritance Games that I finally found the protagonist that I was looking for. That book single-handedly reignited my love for mysteries. I highly recommend it.

While A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder isn’t as good as The Inheritance Games (in my opinion), it still did an excellent job at staying true to its protagonist’s smarts. Pippa is not only a hard worker, but she is possibly the most determined teenager I’ve ever seen. I absolutely loved reading her progress as she pushed her way from clue to clue and my admiration for her grew throughout the entire novel. She may not be as smart as other YA genius protagonists, but she made up for it by sheer force of will.

The premise of the book is extremely standard for mystery novels. Almost all of them have something to do with a mysterious disappearance or a cold case that someone’s rehashing for some reason or another. Regardless, I think Holly Jackson handled this “trope” really well. The book has a mixture of standard narration, journal entries, interviews, texts, and emails. This, along with a solid amount of twists and turns, made it stand out amongst other mystery/thriller novels I read. Once I hit the sort-of climax of the story, I felt that the ending did get more and more predictable as it went along, but that never stopped me from appreciating the ride. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book all the way to the very end.

If you like mysteries and cold cases, I definitely recommend picking this book up. It does a really good job at keeping the reader up to speed with things so even if mystery novels tend to intimidate you, I think this would be an excellent place to start!

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