[Review] A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

minxuanfong1
Mar 2, 2025
6 min read

Updated: Sep 15, 2025

✨ Team Ravi and Pip forever ✨

📚 A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

⭐ Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.5/5)

🏹 Genre: Mystery, thriller

🎯 For fans of: Nail-biting mysteries, major plot twists

Before I start, I need to give you all a spoiler alert!! I am going to be discussing and assessing many components of the book that will eventually lead to spoilers.

If you do not wish to read the spoilers, click here to skip to 🔎 A Journalistic Take:

🔎 Synopsis --

Pippa (Pip) Fitz-Amobi is a 17-year-old girl who has to choose a research question for her capstone school project. The research question she had chosen was about a murder that had happened five years ago. Pretty, popular Andrea (Andie) Bell was brutally murdered by her boyfriend, Salil (Sal) Singh. Or was she? Pip believed that Sal was innocent and that the killer was still out there.

Little did she know, that her small school project would turn into a rollercoaster of events, betrayals, emotional upheavals, blackmail, and even death. Bit by bit, Pip eventually uncovers the truth and it was not what she had expected at all.

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (AGGGTM) was Holly Jackson's debut novel, and an excellent one at that.

Once it hit the shelves, AGGGTM quickly rose to become the New York Time's Bestselling YA crime thriller and has turned into a major BBC series!

I came across the Netflix series before the books and decided to watch it. I was so invested in the show that I decided to buy all three of the books from this series.

What I Loved

✔ Twists and turns – Suspect after suspect, at first it seems like this person, then another person catches her interest. I thoroughly enjoyed going from person to person and learning more about their hidden pasts.

✔ Filled with suspense – When Pip's stalker kept reaching out to her, my heart was filled with dread.

✔ Moral of the story – Just because something appears to be the truth, it may not always be so.

✔ Jaw-dropping plot twist – After I reached the plot twist, I had to put the book down for a whole day to process what I had just read.

What Didn’t Work for Me

❌ Information dumps – There was a lot of information on almost every page of the book. I found it hard to comprehend and got lost in the details.

❌ Unrealistic police incompetence – The police in the book were so incompetent that it made me lose faith in society's justice system. There's no way that highly trained detectives and police officers missed key evidence that Pip, a high schooler, uncovered.

❌ Evidence being uncovered too easily – A lot of the pieces of evidence uncovered by Pip seemed to come whenever it was convenient for her. It seems impossible that the police had not found it first.

❌ Barney's death – Why was this even necessary?! This was the most upsetting part of the entire book. What monster would resort to killing a dog?

I have read many reviews about this book and the TV series. I have several things I want to share. I'll start with the good bits first.

Twists and turns

I thoroughly enjoyed following along in Pip's murder investigation. Every new piece of evidence, every clue, and every suspect kept me hooked from the start of the book till the end. Pip found clues everywhere. This encouraged me to try and solve the case myself. Every few pages I would close the book and think. I would go back to the pages I had read to try and look for clues that I had not noticed before. I felt as if I was involved in the story and not just reading about some girl solving a murder. This story was so immersive, making me feel as if Pip and I were a team, working together to solve a murder in a small town, full of mysteries.

Filled with suspense

Pip's stalker scared me so badly. I can't explain to you how terrified I was to flip every page of the book after she received the note during her camping trip with her friends. I felt Pip's fear and paranoia as if it were my own. In every chapter, I was on edge, fearing that something horrible would happen to Pip.

Moral of the story

My biggest takeaway from this novel is how dangerous the hunt for truth can be. It has taught me that everyone is hiding something; the only difference is the severity of their secrets.

Pip's determination to uncover the truth about Andie Bell, while dangerous, was highly inspiring. She did not let how other people treated her make her determination waver. However, her determination grew into an obsession, making her disregard her own safety in her search for answers. This has taught me the importance of knowing when to stop and take a break.

Jaw-dropping plot twist

This plot twist was so unexpected that my mouth actually fell open. Once the killer was revealed, everything started falling into place, making me wonder why I hadn't seen this coming. The clues were all there, yet the way this story unravelled made me focus on the wrong things and left me blindsided.

However,

Some aspects of the story were not to my liking.

Information dumps

AGGGTM throws clue after clue after clue at you. There are red herrings and connections scattered everywhere, making it a whirlwind of information. One moment Pip uncovers a new piece of evidence, and at the next moment, she's making connections to a previous piece of evidence that I have no recollection of. Whether this is because of my own lousy memory or the sheer volume of information, I think AGGGTM should give us a bit of a rest in between each new piece of evidence to let everything sink in and not have everything happen one after another.

Unrealistic police incompetence

AGGGTM made the police system look like an absolute joke, with police officers missing key details and overlooking crucial pieces of evidence that Pip so easily uncovers. This doesn't seem feasible. These police officers have gone through intense training, and probably have handled multiple cases, only to be outsmarted by a 17-year-old girl with no experience in this field.

Evidence being uncovered too easily

All the pieces of evidence and connections seemed to come fairly easily to Pip, with each investigation accumulating more and more information for her case. The interviews that she had with people also seemed to lead to major revelations with little resistance from the people being questioned.

Barney's death

Tell me why the dog had to die. My heart broke when Pip found Barney dead in the stream. Barney did not deserve that ending :(

🔎 A Journalistic Take:

📰 The Power of Hype & Marketing

AGGGTM was highly successful, becoming the highest-charting bestselling YA debut in the UK in 2019.

According to The Bookseller, "A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder also won the British Book Award Children’s Book of the Year with the first book in the series, and is currently being filmed for a BBC Three TV series adaptation by Moonage Pictures."

Let's take a look at Holly Jackson's marketing strategy

Targetted marketing and PR campaigns
Jackson's novel was published by Farshore. Farshore implemented a focused marketing and public relations campaign to promote the book. At the Young Adult Literature Convention (YALC), exclusive advance copies of the book with the ending cut out were distributed to the rabid readers of the YALC. This kept the readers begging for more, thus securing many future buyers.
Creative promotional materials
Jackson's marketing team devised yet another smart move to generate more buzz for her novel. They created materials that supported their campaign. For example, large-scale posters, chapter samplers, raffle tickets and a prominent social media presence. This engaged potential readers and reviewers, securing even more future buyers.
Visual thematic branding
"Holly Jackson’s novel A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (2019) is decked out in string in both its softcover and hardcover versions, as well as in its marketing." (Vault of Culture, 2020)
In all of the AGGGTM marketing materials, it featured a lot of string imagery, for a classic "murder board" look. This reflected and emphasised the book's identity. This consistent visual branding reinforces the novel's storyline and appeal.

"Jackson hits two million sales" (Melina Spanoudi, 2023).

AGGGTM was given a 4.3/5 star rating on Goodreads. There are varying ratings from different readers.

48% of readers rated this 5 stars

36% of readers rated this 4 stars

12% of readers rated this 3 stars

2% of readers rated this 2 stars

<1% of readers rated this 1 star

This statistic shows that a large majority of readers highly enjoyed this read, and rightly so. Most of the criticism lies in the unrealistic nature of Pip's abilities and the police's incompetence.

Final Thoughts

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is an excellent YA mystery novel, with twists and turns at every flip of a page. Every detail was thoughtfully planned out and the amount of suspense put me at the edge of my seat.

Holly Jackson's page-turning novel, combined with her strong marketing and PR campaign played a crucial role in helping AGGGTM be what it is today. Although there were some issues with the realism of the story, AGGGTM still had me hooked from start to finish and was an excellent read.

💬 Was A Good Girl's Guide to Murder a gripping mystery or just filled with unrealistic twists? Let’s discuss! ⬇️