A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Holly Jackson
Egmont UK, 2019
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is the first in the aptly named A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Series, currently consisting of three novels and one prequel short story. However, this book works perfectly well as a stand-alone read.
Pip likes having everything thing neat, ordered, and sensible. Five years ago, one of her friends died in messy, confusing circumstances. She decides to make the cold case her senior project, on the understanding that she absolutely won't contact the victims' families or open any old wounds. She's lying, tho.
Pip starts at the beginning, interviewing those closest to the murder. No big surprises; she already knew what everyone had officially told the police five years ago, and some people just don't want to talk about the painful past. But some things don't add up, and as she continues to pull on loose threads she finds more things that don't add up. I don't want you to think this book is boring -- it isn't -- but that's a lot of the story. This is a traditional plodding detective novel, but instead of guns and alcoholism, the detective is dealing with homework and high school drama. It turns out that high school is a much better setting for a criminal cover-up than some boring gangland murder, and the action will start to pick up soon. I won't tell you about that, though, because spoilers.
Anyway, lots of people with lots of secrets, a twisty plot with an unpredictable ending, and it's pretty much par-for-the-course for a well-written detective novel. I suspect that I would have enjoyed this more when I was a teenager, but not by much; it's a fun and engaging book, and a good mystery. It is, apparently, written in the general spirit of the Serial podcast, although I cannot comment on that.
One note; when this was published in the US the location was changed from the UK to Connecticut. Along with this there was apparently a fair amount of re-writing, including changing slang used, changes of phrasing, etc. Both versions have maps, pages from planners, and other key evidence interspersed throughout, but the US paper version (but not the eBook) eliminated the footnotes referencing (fake) ULRs in Pip's research. It seems to be generally agreed that the UK version is better, and many readers complain that the US version has lots of little slip-ups that are jarring. Others, apparently those who read a lot of UK fiction, have read the US version and have not noticed the slip-ups, so YMMV.