As Good As Dead” is the third  exciting ,hold-your-breath type final book of the famous  Holly Jackson’s “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” trilogy.Its a much gifted young adult mystery-thriller-crime  series,  and  you have a book review of the first book right on Healthwealthbridge .

Welcome back to my posts, gentle readers! (I learnt of this term of addressing readers from reading a Ruskin Bond book.) 

Today I will be reviewing the final and last book of the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series: As Good as Dead, by Holly Jackson. If you haven’t already, read the previous two book reviews in the series. This was the biggest book among all of the three, and the most intense. It takes a very drastic turn in the middle.

Well then, here’s a short summary first.

We remember Pippa Fitz Amobi, the teenage mystery solver girl with her own podcast. (And if you don’t, then you do now.) This time, she has another case to worry about. Not any friend. Not a relative. Not even a cold case, like Andie Bell’s. No, it was herself.

She was being stalked. Someone knew where she lived, and how she investigated cases in her free time. Whom she was close with.

 And this someone was clever enough to tell her that he/she knew this all, by leaving subtle and intentional clues for her. And ofcourse she panicked.

This stalker’s activities rang a bell in her mind. She searched it up and BOOM. 

Their work matched the doings of a serial killer around 5 or 6  years ago. The duct tape killer. And when did these killings stop? Oh, just randomly on the same day Andie Bell died….(dun dun DUN)

Now events are repeating themselves, and it’s just like deja vu all over again. However, now the victim might just be our protagonist. (According to the dictionary, the protagonist is basically the main hero.)

Pip has a plan to make her life get back to normal again. Save herself to Save herself. Will she be able to do it without being brutally killed? Or will she succumb to the pressure?

Okay, first of all. This book was absolutely AWESOME. And a little terrifying. Just a teeny bit. It had me right on the edge till the end. The book starts off with a BANG and ends also with a BOOM. I liked how the plot is different from the last one, but still continues older investigations, such as the Andie Bell one as well as the one including Jamie Reynolds

Here we can see how instead of solving someone else’s mystery Pip is trying to solve something she herself was now included in. As I mentioned in the first part, someone is stalking her and the interesting part is that their actions match with a serial killer….she very well could have gone to the police except for the fact that the serial killer in question had pleaded guilty in court and was in prison.

Five years ago.

Back to when Andie Bell died.

It is way too coincidental.

The stalker was getting closer to her. And she knew it. And she had to survive it.

Anyway that’s enough of gloom and doom, let’s go to our characters.

Most of them are the same as the previous books suggest, however the roles some play are drastically changed.

 Ravi is as always Pip’s partner in crime, and Cara has started to work at a coffee shop, but they still meet up. The Bell family still kind of hates Pip, but Dawn Bell (the scared wife of Jason Bell and other of Andie and Becca) is friendly enough. Becca Bell is in jail, and I’m sure you would know why if you read the first book at all. But she still calls Pip weekly and both are like old friends. (weird, considering she was the one who put her in jail, but whatever.)

This book focuses on how Pip learns who her stalker is and how she escapes the vicious cycle.

 And escaping it also sadly included her almost being killed-but whatever that’s something else to worry about, and I don’t want to give too many spoilers.

 Even when she went to the police, they didn’t believe her. She (very characteristical of Pip) created an Xcel document marking all the #SUS or suspicious events that led her to believe she had a stalker. And she ranked them. (That’s called dedication, folks, okay)

While reading this book a lot of the doubts I had about AGGGTM and GGBB (Abbreviations of the names of the previous two books in the series because I don’t want to type that much.) clicked into place, and in some cases ,I realised it before Pip mentions the connection she thought was there.

I’m giving one example, I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler. The duct tape killer’s victims were all female, and generally young adults. He used to take a personal possession from them after their death as if keeping trophies. One of them included a girl who used to take a light purple hairbrush in her handbag all the time. Of course the DT Killer took it.

Now remember Andie Bell’s room? How everything had been preserved in time like her death never happened? Well among the description was a makeup bag overflowing with skincare products, hair ties, lipsticks, and….Drumroll please- A lilac hairbrush exactly the same as the missing trophy from the dead girl.

While we know that ofcourse anyone can have the same hairbrush as another person, it’s probably available online or at the nearest store! But remember how the killings stopped right when Andie Bell died? Thats the weird, confusing connection.

Well duh, the supposed ‘dt killer’ was in jail and had never been released till that date, but now events were repeating themselves. So obviously we can’t think that Andie Bell just MIGHT have been the killer, if thats what you’re thinking. And the ‘killer’ was still in jail. So who was doing the stalking?

It had to be someone close enough to know Pip well. It also had to be someone who had a close connection with Andie Bell. Someone who could convince the police that he/she was innocent while the poor guy in jail was not.

If you don’t want to be sad, then I’d suggest not to read this book, because in some places it is quite sad. But again the plot is awesome and if you refrain from reading the depressing parts over and over again, and it can make you cry. 

While ‘Good girl Bad blood’ s plot twist was more drastic than the one in As Good As Dead, things definitely took a darker turn here! And the main reason Pip herself couldn’t understand what certain things connected to (And we were able to) was that she was under the pressure of knowing she might be killed sometime soon.

Anyhow, its an awesome thriller and the last book in this plot. Another is there, ‘Kill Joy’, as far as I remember, but its on a completely different storyline and nothing is the same.

Well, goodbye readers! See you all later, probably in another review!

Cheerio 😀

I am participating in Blogchatter A2Z 2025 and also the April Ultimate blog challenge.

Here’s my A post.

This is a B post.