A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

"This book was shortlisted for the 2020 Great Reads Award in the senior category. This is the story of Pippa Fitz-Amobi, or Pip, in a small town in England. For her final year project at school she’s decided to work on the role media plays in police investigations. That’s really just a cover because she wants to investigate the circumstances around the disappearance of a student a few years previous. Sal Singh, the student’s boyfriend, committed suicide and is generally seen as the person responsible for the disappearance of his girlfriend. Pip feels that there’s some kind of injustice and that he wasn’t guilty, that there was something missing in the police investigation. She wants to study journalism at university, and being an investigative journalist is a career that’s very much of interest to her. So she is the lead investigator in this crime novel, and then you have her sidekick, Ravi Singh who is the brother of the young man who committed suicide. I like crime novels and thrillers , and I found this one particularly well written. It sets up the intrigue, and then through a series of very well-constructed episodes, anticlimaxes, threatening messages and just-in-time moments, the author brings Pip to success in the investigation of the crime. Pip very carefully and methodically considers her suspects, follows the clues and puts together a very comprehensive investigation into the whole thing. I like the narrative shape, which alternates between her lived reality and reproductions of the various documents and paperwork of her project, which is a very well used device on the part of the author. The novel also records Pip’s interactions with the various suspects and with Ravi as well, and their growing friendship and eventually romantic relationship. Another impressive thing is the way this novel shows how ubiquitous social media and technology are in our lives now. I also like that Pip is what you call a good girl. She goes out to a drink and drugs fuelled party to go undercover for her investigation, and her parents are teasing her that she should be just a little bit irresponsible. Pip is intelligent, she’s ambitious, she has a mind of her own, she’s persuasive, she’s very organised, she’s filled with a sense of justice and fairness, she’s sensitive and kind and she’s a good friend. She does sometimes act outside of the rules to get what she wants, and at one point she’s wondering whether she has lost her moral compass, which I think is a really good discussion to have. In her investigation she gets into people’s Facebook pages by false means, for example, and she wonders how far she will actually go. That whole exploration of the good girl idea in the title is really well done."

"This book was a game changer for the Young Adult mystery thriller genre. I remember reading it and thinking: “Oh, my goodness, it’s so well-plotted”. It uses online articles and interview transcripts, and it’s got this really clever web of different characters, motives, and red herrings. It’s about a girl called Pip, who — for her final year project at school — decides to investigate the disappearance of local sweetheart Andie Bell, who vanished five years before the story takes place. The case has been closed because everyone in her small town believes that Andy was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal. But Pip isn’t convinced. She teams up with Sal’s younger brother Ravi, and starts to uncover secrets that a lot of people want to stay hidden. Pip is such a determined, some would say obsessive, character. She is adamant that she is going to find out the truth without letting any of the stories that people tell about others get in the way. There’s a theme of how people create narratives about others, who often aren’t there to defend themselves, based on the stories they’ve experienced before, their internal biases and prejudices, and what they read in the media. There is a really horrible reporter character in the book who is extremely racist, and he’s worked hard to build Sal up as a monster in the press. He’s used Sal’s Indian heritage as a way to mark him out as a bad guy, and the people in the small town have bought into this. Pip wants to make sure that she follows the actual evidence to discover the truth. The book is all about how revealing the truth can be freeing and can help people, while false “truths” can ruin lives if enough people believe them. This book has a lot of good messages in it, and good people. You also get to know the victim as you read, and you learn that even though she was beautiful and popular and everybody thought she was the perfect girl, she actually wasn’t always a very nice person. She’s a very nuanced character, because the reason that she wasn’t very nice is that she had a pretty terrible father, who pitted her against her sister. It’s really cleverly done, and shows how outward impressions of people aren’t always the right ones. I think if any teenager hasn’t read anything in the mystery thriller genre, this book is a really good one to begin with. The characters start off just investigating, but then it becomes personal and their own lives end up in danger, so it’s quite exciting. It’s the first book in a series of three, and they’re all really good."