By Dennis Fischman

You might think that murder is a purely adult subject, but you’d be mistaken. An increasing number of mysteries books are featuring high school students (like the five held in detention in One of Us is Lying, teenagers (Ingrid Levin-Hill in Down the Rabbit Hole, or even tweens (like the title character in Drew Leclair Gets a Clue, in which it’s character assassination, not literal murder—but when you’re twelve, the stakes seem just as high!).

In A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, our heroine is Pippa Fitz-Amobi, a high school senior who hopes to be a journalist someday. She lives in a town where, only five years earlier, a high school girl named Andie Bell was murdered. The solution at the time was that Andie’s boyfriend killed her, then himself.

‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ by Holly Jackson.
Delacorte Press, 2020, 390 pages.

But is that really what happened? Pippa decides to find out. She reopens the cold case and does her own interviews and investigation – for her senior project!

If that sounds a bit unlikely, consider that Pippa knew the young man who supposedly committed the crime, and he was always kind to her. That’s not enough reason to consider him innocent, of course, but it is a good reason for her to wonder – and want to find out. His younger brother, Ravi, is convinced of his innocence, and he becomes Pippa’s partner in solving crime (and eventually, in other things).

Pippa would have been my friend in high school, but as an adult, the risks she takes just drive me crazy. Still, she’s smart and the right things matter to her. A normal sense of danger will come at the right developmental age. Her parents are decent adults, too, which is unusual for this genre but not in real life – the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!

It’s ironic that lately, I’ve been reading adult mysteries where the motivation of the killer doesn’t make any sense, and here is this YA novel with a full appreciation for human complexity.

There are two more books in this series, but warning: what happens in book two (which came out in 2020) is traumatic for our dear Pippa. For me, too, because I care about her. I still have not recovered enough to pick up book three.

Dennis Fischman is a member of the Somerville Public Library’s Mystery Book Club and an inveterate reader.