“A Good Girl’s Guide:” Nerds Can Solve Crimes Too
- Haley Wong (she/her)
- Oct 3, 2022
- 2 min read
Straight-A student Pippa will do anything for a good grade, including solve a murder. Five years ago, Sal Singh killed his girlfriend, Andie Bell. Everyone in the town of Fairview accepts this as fact, everyone except Pippa. For years, this case has remained closed despite its many inconsistencies, and she is determined to uncover the truth. As she delves deeper into Fairview’s secretive underbelly, she learns more than she ever wanted to know about her beloved
hometown.
She really should be working on her college essay, but instead Pip spends her afternoons interrogating, scheming and, most honorably, breaking and entering with none other than Sal Singh’s younger brother, Ravi. Every good sleuth needs a partner in crime, and Ravi is more than willing to bring justice to his family’s name. Searching for answers leads the pair into peril as the horrors that haunted Fairview all those years ago come out to play once more. Together, they discover that some things are better left buried.
“A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” is Young Adult perfection. It takes serious talent to write an engaging murder mystery from the perspective of someone besides the main victim, and Holly Jackson does just that. Pippa’s story could have easily been terribly mediocre, but Jackson’s knack for writing suspense ensured that the hairs on the back of her reader’s necks would remain perpetually upright.
Pippa’s character is the fictional manifestation of Gen Z’s obsession with true crime, so it is only fitting that this novel brings readers along for the ride in her investigation. Every piece of evidence she collects is displayed neatly in her project logs, clever breaks in Pip’s narration which quicken the book’s pulse by eliminating extraneous scenes. Her pointedly accessible organization allows the audience to play detective. This work reads like a 1000 piece puzzle. That is, if puzzles were actually fun and not just torturous fever dreams.
The majority of this work was crafted by an expert hand, but its conclusion lacked closure. “A Good Girl’s Guide” serves as the premiere novel in a trilogy, but its unsatisfactory ending did not even manage to prepare readers for a sequel. Its sole success was in frustrating those who expected better from an otherwise spectacular novel.
If every thriller resembled “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder,” I would have a new favorite genre. YA authors beware; Holly Jackson is out for blood.
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