A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is a young adult mystery by the British writer Holly Jackson, published in 2019 as her first novel.

Pip is seventeen, an enthusiast for true crime, and aware that access to a closed case is the whole difficulty: the police have finished, the town has settled, and the people she needs to talk to have spent five years avoiding the subject. Her project produces the novel's structure, since the book is assembled out of interview transcripts, diary entries, phone logs and Pip's own notes, and the reader follows the evidence as she collects it. The investigation is less tidy than the podcasts she listens to, and one of the things the novel does well is show how a community closes around an explanation that suits it. Sal's family, the police file, the friends who were at the party and the man who found the body all give her something slightly different, and the answers she gets do not always point where she expects. The book is the first of a series that continued with Good Girl, Bad Blood and As Good As Dead, and a six-part television adaptation was released by the BBC in 2024.