book review as good as dead

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A Controversial Thriller: ‘As Good As Dead’ Review

This will be quite a polarizing book… that was a RIDE.

Name: As Good As Dead

Author: holly jackson, published: august 2021.

Pip is about to head to college, but she is still haunted by the way her last investigation ended. She’s used to online death threats in the wake of her viral true-crime podcast, but she can’t help noticing an anonymous person who keeps asking her: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Soon the threats escalate and Pip realizes that someone is following her in real life. When she starts to find connections between her stalker and a local serial killer caught six years ago, she wonders if maybe the wrong man is behind bars. Police refuse to act, so Pip has only one choice: find the suspect herself—or be the next victim. As the deadly game plays out, Pip discovers that everything in her small town is coming full circle . . .and if she doesn’t find the answers, this time she will be the one who disappears. . .

I have absolute faith in Holly Jackson. I trust her to give me the best plot twists, mysteries and characters – the first two books in this series, ‘A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder’ and ‘Good Girl, Bad Blood’, are some of the best YA thrillers out there. And despite veering violently from the tone of the first two books, Pip’s final showdown similarly didn’t disappoint.

One of my favourite things about the AGGGTM trilogy is how realistic they are. As someone who grew up in a small English town, I can see the events of the series unfurling exactly as they do on page. And in this book, Pip is no different. She’s written so realistically. YA books enjoy glossing over undeniable mental effects inflicted by a character’s trauma. (You watched your best friend murder your whole family? Take a nap, and you’ll forget all about it!). But Holly Jackson doesn’t slip into that easy groove. In this final book of the trilogy, Pip has come a long way from her ‘good girl’ persona and has developed essentially PTSD. It’s a character development that puts you in a pretty unique position. I have never before seen how solving murder cases impacted a character in YA – again showing how these books are rooted in the real world.

“Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?” – HOLLY JACKSON, ‘AS GOOD AS DEAD’

My other favourite thing? Holly Jackson’s writing is like a shot of pure adrenaline. Explosive. Scarier than some outright horror books I’ve read, ‘As Good As Dead’ is the sort of book you have to put down and turn around carefully, overcome with the feeling that someone’s stood directly behind you…

This book is terrifying! Like the covers, the books get progressively darker as the series goes on. Pip becomes more obsessive over each case, and her world grows a little smaller each time. This claustrophobic atmosphere is cleverly shown in how ‘As Good Is Dead’ focuses on the events of the first book.

It’s almost cathartic, to complete the series in such a way that the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. To complete one revolution of the plot and finish at the start. And most surprising of all, it doesn’t feel tacked on, or like the author hadn’t planned this plot development from the beginning ( Truly Devious’ author Maureen Johnson, take notes!). Holly Jackson answers questions I didn’t know I had and fills the cracks in her already incredibly strong wall of a plot, shoring up a structure that I’m sure will last decades. You’re looking at a modern classic in Young Adult literature.

But, why have I labelled ‘As Good As Dead’ as a controversial thriller? The rest of the review contains minor spoilers – I will only refer to a ‘plot twist’ but if you want to go into the book totally clueless, skip to the bottom and the like button 🙂

‘As Good As Dead’ will be a pretty polarising book. Around the halfway mark, a ground-breaking, stomach-churning plot twist flips the YA murder mystery formula on its head. Frankly, I’m obsessed! But I can see why other readers disagree.

Young Adult is defined as the literary category for 12-18 year olds. I think this is where most of the trouble lies – the plot twist is controversial because it’s pretty dark for a Young Adult novel. Theoretically, a 12 year old could be the target market for ‘As Good As Dead’, buy it… and be traumatised. Personally, I don’t think this makes the plot twist a bad one, just that people should be made aware that this isn’t an Enid Blyton novel. Especially if you’re under 13, I’d recommend you check out the Trigger Warnings for ‘As Good As Dead’ before you read it – you can find a link to them here .

However, age ratings aside, ‘As Good As Dead’ will also be controversial because it’s unconventional. But I found the plot twist so unorthodox that it was fascinating; shouldn’t we be pushing for books that break boundaries? ‘As Good As Dead’ made me question everything, made me properly think. That’s a good book in my eyes.

If this was a standalone novel, I doubt I’d be so conflicted by Pip’s actions. Probably, I’d straight up disagree with them. But you’re in such a unique position with ‘As Good As Dead’ – the first two books are incredibly different vibes, but they made you love Pip and Ravi and her friends. I was constantly pulled between begging Pip not to go through with it, and an uncomfortable understanding of her motives…

This whole series has been unconventional from the start – a huge part of why I love it so much. But ‘As Good As Dead’ had me utterly hooked. THE tensest book I’ve ever read. Generic YA formula was blindfolded, stabbed and then incinerated – I had genuinely no clue what was going to happen at all times and it was exhilarating.

We don’t get enough morally grey female characters in YA literature so I found the plot twist a fascinating turn. I think it’s important that the author doesn’t condone Pip’s actions too far (I’m so conflicted about framing Max. Like is he a horrible person? Yes. But does he really deserve life imprisonment for a crime he didn’t commit?).

However, this isn’t a handbook or an advice novel. ‘As Good As Dead’ is fiction: there to entertain you and confuse you and terrify you. And that it did.

33 thoughts on “ A Controversial Thriller: ‘As Good As Dead’ Review ”

I loved this book as well, in fact it’s my favourite of the three books in the trilogy! Loved reading your review- I completely agree with your point about the lack of morally grey characters in YA literature!

It’s my favourite too!! I’m so glad you agree 😊

Like Liked by 1 person

Completely agree with the age rating thing definitely not for the younger side of YA but for us older folks absolutely amazing!

Yes totally! It’s a tricky topic, because a YA books often cover pretty dark stuff. As young people, we’re see in the media topics like those in the book every day, so I don’t want to be like ‘oh it’s not appropriate’. But at the same time it was pretty out of the blue! What do you think? 🙂

I think the darker progression of the series was the appropriate choice for the books and it gave people the heads up that things were going to get darker but the serial killer twist did catch me out

Yeah me too!

I did not know this book or its author so I warmly thank you for talking about them 💙💙💙

I’m so glad to share the love! Hope you enjoy them if you ever try it 😊

Thank you very much!🙋‍♀️

omg this is an absolutely STUNNING review! i adore and agree with everything you said: this is definitely a controversial read, and it wouldn’t work well as a standalone, but Holly Jackson does an incredible job of breaking boundaries and showing just how deep Pip’s trauma (rightfully) goes. great review!💜

Thank you so much!! That means a lot 😊 I totally agree with you – and sometimes you need books that break boundaries haha. It can just be unexpected if you didn’t anticipate it! That’s what happened here for me, what do you think?

i agree with you, it was definitely unexpected! i think I also just prefer a mystery aspect as opposed to more of a “cut-and”dry” thriller if that makes sense? i still really enjoyed this one though!

wow, this gave me a new..way of interception of the plot twist. i do agree that morally grey femaile characters in books are rare, the book just got realy dark at the end comlared to the starting.

but it really hurt when pip told Ravi they couldn’t be together.. and

and.. i forgot to finish writing my previous comment and just published it😂

i loved this review!! it is so well written.

Aw thank you so much!! That means a lot 😊

Arg yes!! The ending almost killed me, it was so sad 😦 I’ve seen a lot of reviews saying it wasn’t necessary and I do kind of agree (just another way to make us readers feel pain hahaha) but the last page made up for it! Do you think it was necessary? 🙂

Amazing review!! I agree with so much of what you say here – it’s incredibly dark for a book primarily aimed at young adults, but totally tense and thrilling and I was completely on edge!

Yes totally! It’s hard, because a lot of young adult books explore pretty difficult topics and as young people, we’re exposed to topics like those in the book every day, so I don’t want to be like ‘oh it’s not appropriate’. But at the same time it was pretty out of the blue! What do you think? 🙂

Yes I completely agree! So sorry for the super late reply.

Haha no worries! 🙂

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I couldn’t have written a better review if I had tried!! I agree with everything you said!! The plot twist kept me up at night and as you said it was even scarier than some horror books! I loved how much darker this got! I will ever get over that ending but it really made sense and was really realistic in terms of character development. Have you seen the news that this is getting an adaptation for the BBC?

Aw thank you thank you thank you! That means so much, especially from such a good blogger like you 😊 And no I hadn’t heard about the adaptation! How exciting – as long as Holly Jackson is involved in the writing process, I can imagine it will be fantastic. What do you think? Do you have high hopes?

Oh thank you!! This means a lot coming from you too 🥺 I think it’s going to be amazing!! The BBC usually does a good job with book adaptations so I have high hopes for it! 🥰

Fingers crossed!

Thank you so much!

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AS GOOD AS DEAD

From the good girl's guide to murder series , vol. 3.

by Holly Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 28, 2021

Intricately plotted and heart-pounding.

Everything comes full circle in this trilogy closer.

It’s not easy being Pippa Fitz-Amobi: Max Hastings, a teen rapist who was found not guilty, is suing her for defamation. She blames herself for the death of local journalist Stanley Forbes, who was revealed to be the child of a serial killer, but she also feels a kinship with his killer, Charlie Green, who is on the run. To cope with her PTSD, Pip takes Xanax purchased from drug dealer Luke Eaton, who indirectly supplied the late Andie Bell, the subject of her first case. Pip is used to online threats, but one message has been appearing again and again: “Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?” Someone is leaving dead pigeons in Pip’s front yard and mysterious chalk figures in her driveway, but Detective Hawkins doesn’t believe there’s a pattern and refuses to investigate. Research into her own stalker leads to an imprisoned serial killer who supposedly confessed, but the connections are striking, and Pip fears the police may have the wrong man. This volume centers on a psychologically traumatized Pip, whose actions inhabit morally gray areas till the very end. Her romance with Ravi Singh is a much-needed balm, but their love is tragically tested. A particular strength is the way elements in this novel connect with clues from earlier entries. Pip’s mother is cued as White and her father, as Black; Ravi is of Indian descent.

Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-37985-1

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT MYSTERY & THRILLER | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES

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BOOK REVIEW

by Holly Jackson

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IF HE HAD BEEN WITH ME

by Laura Nowlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2013

There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head.

The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.

Autumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart; their mothers are still best friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like[s] him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations.

Pub Date: April 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4022-7782-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT ROMANCE | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES

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by Laura Nowlin

Sales of Print Books Fall in First Three Quarters

SEEN & HEARD

IF ONLY I HAD TOLD HER

by Laura Nowlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A heavy read about the harsh realities of tragedy and their effects on those left behind.

In this companion novel to 2013’s If He Had Been With Me , three characters tell their sides of the story.

Finn’s narrative starts three days before his death. He explores the progress of his unrequited love for best friend Autumn up until the day he finally expresses his feelings. Finn’s story ends with his tragic death, which leaves his close friends devastated, unmoored, and uncertain how to go on. Jack’s section follows, offering a heartbreaking look at what it’s like to live with grief. Jack works to overcome the anger he feels toward Sylvie, the girlfriend Finn was breaking up with when he died, and Autumn, the girl he was preparing to build his life around (but whom Jack believed wasn’t good enough for Finn). But when Jack sees how Autumn’s grief matches his own, it changes their understanding of one another. Autumn’s chapters trace her life without Finn as readers follow her struggles with mental health and balancing love and loss. Those who have read the earlier book will better connect with and feel for these characters, particularly since they’ll have a more well-rounded impression of Finn. The pain and anger is well written, and the novel highlights the most troublesome aspects of young adulthood: overconfidence sprinkled with heavy insecurities, fear-fueled decisions, bad communication, and brash judgments. Characters are cued white.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781728276229

Page Count: 416

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT ROMANCE

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Book Series Recaps

So what happened in book one.

What happened in As Good As Dead? (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #3)

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Read a full summary of As Good As Dead , book #3 in Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series. This page is full of spoilers, so beware. If you are wondering what happened in As Good As Dead , then you are in the right place!

Special thanks to Susan Jensen, a new BSR contributor, who wrote this great recap! Visit her blog to check out what she’s reading and see what’s on her mind. And don’t forget to follow Susan on Goodreads and Facebook !

Author Holly Jackson

Ratings 4.4 stars on Amazon 4.23 stars on Goodreads Add As Good As Dead at Goodreads.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #1 A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (recap) #2 Good Girl, Bad Blood (recap) #3 As Good As Dead (this page)

***** Everything below is a SPOILER *****

What happened in As Good As Dead ?

As Pippa Fitz-Amobi is leaving her house, heading to a mediation meeting in New York City, she notices a dead pigeon on her lawn. She doesn’t think much about it, her mind focused on the upcoming meeting. In the city, she meets with her lawyer, Max Hastings (a serial rapist Pip outed in one of the previous books), his lawyer, and a mediator. Max is planning to sue Pip for libel for posting a “defamatory statement” about him on her podcast. He agrees to drop the lawsuit if she posts a statement admitting she was wrong and apologizing to Max. She also must say that the audio clip she used was doctored. Furious, Pip refuses and storms out.

Because of the trauma Pip has been experiencing, she’s been buying Xanax from a local dealer to help her relax and sleep. She keeps promising herself she’ll quit, but her doctor won’t prescribe more and she’s addicted. She uses secret burner phones that she hides in a desk drawer to contact the dealer so that no one—especially not her boyfriend, Ravi Singh, will know about the pills.

Pip receives an email, another one, from an anonymous sender with the message: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? She’s gotten threats before, so she doesn’t let it bother her too much. The next day, she discovers odd headless stick figures drawn in chalk on her driveway. She dismisses it as the work of neighbor kids.

Ravi and Pip go to a cafe. Pip’s friend, Cara, works there. She tells them about an altercation that happened at the cafe earlier in the day in which Max Hastings and Jason Bell (the father of Becca and Andie, the former of whom was drugged and raped by Max, an incident which led to the death of the latter) shoved each other and had words.

The next day, Pip returns home from a run to find more chalk figures (the previous ones having been washed away by rain). This time, there are five headless stick figures positioned closer to her house than last time. A couple steps later, she notices another dead pigeon on her lawn, in exactly the same place as the first. This one has no head. When Pip receives another email message, this one referring to killing two birds with one stone, she is creeped out. It’s clear someone is stalking her, trying to scare her. When she goes back over the messages, she realizes they’ve been coming—infrequently—for months.

On another run, Pip finds a chalk message on her regular route that says Dead Girl Walking. Pip takes a photo, which Ravi encourages her to show to the police. Detective Hawkins dismisses her claims, saying she has no real evidence that someone is stalking her. She decides she’ll take the case herself and find out who her stalker is.

Pip is becoming obsessed with watching for her stalker, so Ravi persuades her to go on a walk with him. While out, they run into Ant and Lauren (two of Pip’s former friends). They exchange heated words. Pip asks Ant if he was waiting for her to disappear, but he’s clearly confused by the question, making it unlikely that he’s her stalker. As Pip and Ravi approach Pip’s house, they see another chalk drawing. This time, it’s three headless stick figures, now so close they’re almost touching the house. Alarmed, Pip thinks the figures getting progressively closer to her house means the stalker is coming for her.

Pip does an Internet search for chalk figures and notes with the message she’s been getting and gets a hit. An article about the DT (Duct Tape) Killer, who strangled four women in a nearby Connecticut town six years ago, comes up. The murderer was known for wrapping his victims’ entire heads in duct tape before killing them. According to the article, one victim found chalk drawings and dead birds before being killed. A man named Billy Karras was accused of the crimes and was sentenced to prison, where he’s been ever since. Pip also finds a Facebook page maintained by Billy’s mother who insists he’s innocent despite a confession, which she says was coerced. Pip decides she needs to investigate the case.

Maria Karras is thrilled to hear from Pip. She says she has contacted Pip via her podcast email before but never gotten a response. Maria gives Pip many reasons the “evidence” against Billy doesn’t stack up. She insists that her son, as an employee of Green Scene Ltd. (a lawn maintenance company owned by Jason Bell), was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. After reading through the police interview with Billy, Pip tends to agree.

Pip continues to receive threatening messages, including phone calls where all she can hear is someone breathing. Her printer also goes off in the middle of the night, letting through a printed sheet with the same message—Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?—from her stalker.

While out on a run, Pip decides to stop at the Bell house and question Jason about Billy Karras. He shuts the door in her face and tells her never to contact him again. On her way home, Pip is just about run down by a white car. No one can tell who the driver is, and he/she speeds off.

Since the harassing phone calls continue, Pip puts an app on her phone that can identify unlisted numbers. Pip meets with Harriet Hunter, the sister of the DT Killer victim who also saw dead birds outside her home. Harriet mentions that Andie Bell [whose murder Pip investigated in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder ] contacted her before Andie’s death. She also gives Pip the email address Andie used; it’s an address Pip has never seen before. When Pip hacks into the account, she discovers an unsent email Andie wrote saying she knows the identity of the DT Killer, that it’s someone who spent time in her home. She does not, however, identify him by name.

As she’s out for another run, Pip receives another anonymous phone call. Her app is identifying the call when Pip hears a phone ring behind her. Before she knows what is happening, she feels herself being hauled off and put in the trunk of someone’s car. When she is let out, she is at Green Scene Ltd.’s remote warehouse. Jason Bell is her captor. As he wraps her face in duct tape and binds her to a shelving unit, he admits to being the DT Killer.

When Jason leaves in his car, Pip manages to free herself. She’s escaping through the woods when she hears him return. Picking up a hammer, she hits him with it until he is dead. Knowing she has just committed willful murder that was not technically in self-defense, Pip decides she can’t go to the police. Instead, she calls Ravi. Together, they hatch a plan to manipulate Jason’s body temperature in order to fool the coroner into thinking he died hours later than he did, establish alibis for themselves, set fire to the Green Scene warehouse to destroy any remaining evidence pointing to Pip’s involvement, and frame Max Hastings for the murder of Jason Bell.

Days later, Detective Hawkins asks Pip to come down to the police station. As he interviews her, he tells her that her white headphones were found at Jason Bell’s home. Shocked, she realizes that they must have fallen out of her backpack when she went there to question him before he abducted her. Pip can’t admit that she was ever at Jason’s home, so she says she has no idea how the headphones got there. Detective Hawkins obviously doesn’t believe her, but he lets her go.

How did As Good As Dead end?

Scared, Pip decides she has to confess to the police that she murdered Jason. Ravi doesn’t want her to. When she goes to his house to say goodbye to him, he isn’t there. She passes him on the street, and he tells her that he just lied and told Detective Hawkins that he lost Pip’s headphones when he went to the Bells’ house to ask Jason about helping with a fundraiser. Convinced (for now) not to confess to the police, Pip is out running when she spots commotion at the Hastings’ house. Max is being arrested for Jason’s murder.

When Max later sees Pip at the police station, he accuses her of setting him up and shoves her into a brick wall. Max is restrained by the police and taken away. Pip meets with Detective Hawkins again. She senses he knows what really happened to Jason Bell, but has chosen not to pursue the truth since there’s enough evidence to convict Max. Pip gives him evidence showing that Jason was the DT Killer.

Billy Karras is later released from prison because evidence proves Jason was the DT Killer, not him. Because Pip does not want Ravi to be in any danger because of her, she breaks up with him. They are both devastated. Pip says they can only be together if Max, not Pip, goes to prison for murder.

Pip goes off to college in New York City and does not contact Ravi. She also distances herself from her family and friends, just in case she is convicted of murder. Over a year later, Max Hastings is convicted of Jason Bell’s murder. As Good As Dead ends with a text from Ravi to Pip saying, “Hey, Sarge, remember me?”

There you go! That’s what happened in As Good As Dead . We hope you enjoyed this As Good As Dead summary with spoilers.

Ready to read or reread As Good As Dead or other books in this series? Click to buy and help us pay for hosting! (paid links)

What should you read after The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series?

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Here are a few suggestions! Click to learn more (paid links): Truly Devious , The List , The Thursday Murder Club , The Inheritance Games

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40 thoughts on “What happened in As Good As Dead? (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #3)”

I really think there should be a fourth book since this book left us on such a cliffhanger, this authir inspires me and i read all her books in 1 weeks i really hope you agree with my idea

She really needs to

Absolutely I spent so long looking on websites for what happened to pip and Ravi but found nothing 😢 WE NEED THAT LAST BOOK

Completely agree with you.

Ravi do text him in the end, i guess that’s the sign for us that yeahhhh they did re united at very end 😌

I completely agree

I think instead of an entire fourth book (since it ended at a good place and Pip probably wouldnt start another investigation) Holly Jackson should wright a short story about how pip reunites with her family and friends and Ravi. Where everything is -mostly- OK.

Ye I agree. It should be like a short story like she did with kill joy the book before a good girl’s guide to murder. BC a whole extra book would be like alot especially with the BBC series coming out later in the year.

I think that instead of writing an whole 4th book, Holly Jackson should just wright a short story where Pip reunites with everyone and she doesn’t investigate anything. She just revisits her past, with the people she loves.

frfr i mean WHY is she making more new books we need more pip and ravi but maybe the only part that I do NOT like is where why tf was ravi crying like a c.ai character like fr they have been together for only like 1 year ?!?!?!?!?!?

I totally agree. All I won’t is Pip and Ravi to be together foreverrrr.

Loved it… Even cried when I thought she was going to confess and when she broken up with Ravi… Such a thrilling experience… Too bad it doesn’t have another sequel.

AHH OMG OMG SCREAMING THIS WAS SO GOOD AH

I’m crying. I finished it and I can’t even believe it. I can’t stop crying that they broke up, it’s like they broke up with us as well. It pains my heart so much but she did what she had to do.

I know. There should’ve been like an alternative ending just so we could be happy lol

So, I love the books. honestly would love a continuation for Pip’s and Ravi’s relationship after that 1 year, 8 moths and 16 days lmao, bc it is stressing me out, but even if there won’t be a 4th ik for sure they will figure it out. #teamRaviandPip

I loved this recap, but Pip actually went to university in England; Cambridge to be exact, so maybe you would want to edit that.

There actually 2 versions of the book, so I think that adds to the confusion of university and cities. All events and names remained the same tho.

I love this book!!!! Is so thriller and romantic 🙂

probably my favorite book rn, i finished it at like 3AM and i was sobbing. love the recap tho!

I just finished the book. I thought Jason took the headphones as a trophy for killing Pip(prior to returning and attempting to kill her since he took trophies from his victims). I don’t think they fell out when she went to question him at his house. Her and Ravi even had a fight about how Ravi asked her if she’d had everything when they were trying to hide the murder. Overall I thought this book was good. I did think that Holly Jackson could’ve tightened up her writing so we didn’t have 10-15 chapters of them covering up the murder (couldve been handled and suspensful in 5 to 8 chapters i feel) and we didnt need the extensive exposition from Pip. I thought that was overkill and unnecessary. I listened as an audiobook so i felt like fast forwarding sometimes. I did think it was an interesting twist and a show of how a failed justice system could push someone in such a wild direction. Overall great book but not my favorite in terms of unnecessary exposition. I generally like books that are clear concise and still give us suspense without too much chat.

Jason did take them as a trophy ☠️☠️☠️

fr he is messed up as hell :000 no wonder his wife left him he deserved what he got

In my mind pip and ravi got back toghter no matter what there pip and ravi they got married and all the sappy lovey stuff they deserve and no one can tell me other wise.

OMG yes same! Team Ravi & Pip for life.

Yayay same !!!

NO because like thats what happened right? Staying delulu is the solulu

That is what I live by till the day I die.

How can we contact the author I would really love to ask her to write another sequel there are alot of questions left unanswered

Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?

stop playing lmaoo

the real police not stupid detective

i also feel like Holly Jackson should release like a novella after the 3rd book which shows us pip and ravi together and happy. but overall the books were amazing

She totally should cause I would read it

Absolutely and definetly wooooouuuuuld!!

Well technically she did end up reuniting with Ravi that bit just wasn’t thaaat clear and now it’s stressing me! 😭😭

Review | As Good As Dead – Holly Jackson

A year after the release I finally read the final book in the A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series and today I want to share my thoughts with you all. I loved the first two books and the prequel novella and was so curious to see if As Good As Dead would live up to my expectations.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SERIESThe highly-anticipated finale to the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series, the instant bestsellers that read like your favorite true crime podcast or show. By the end of this mystery series, you'll never think of good girls the same way again... Pip is about to head to college, but she is still haunted by the way her last investigation ended. She’s used to online death threats in the wake of her viral true-crime podcast, but she can’t help noticing an anonymous person who keeps asking her: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Soon the threats escalate and Pip realizes that someone is following her in real life. When she starts to find connections between her stalker and a local serial killer caught six years ago, she wonders if maybe the wrong man is behind bars. Police refuse to act, so Pip has only one choice: find the suspect herself—or be the next victim. As the deadly game plays out, Pip discovers that everything in her small town is coming full circle . . .and if she doesn’t find the answers, this time she will be the one who disappears. . .

This book is the third and final one in a series so there will be some spoilers for the first two books in here. I had forgotten a lot of details from the first two books as it had been two years since I read the previous one. Luckily most of those details came back to me while reading this book, a lot of important things are mentioned when you need them which I appreciated a lot.

“Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?”

We follow Pip again, she is about to head to college but is also dealing with the aftermath of the previous two books. I personally loved how that was handled. Pip is clearly not okay, and I can’t imagine anyone would be after going through what she has been going through. She keeps seeing blood on her hands, sees death everywhere and has some trouble concentrating. And on top off that she keeps running into Max (whom she accused of rape). This was all written in such a believable way and I appreciated a lot. In some books something traumatising happens to the main character and they seem just fine, which always annoys me.

“time? An impossible contradiction that she would never settle. It was her undoing, her fatal flaw, the hill she would die and decay on.”

Apart from Pip being traumatised, she also starts to realise she might have a stalker. And there seems to be a connection to a serial killer from years ago. This was a very interesting turn of events and I did not predict what happened next. While I was reading I predicted one twist but was completely blown away by another. And from reading other reviews I know a lot of readers hate that twist. But I have to say I loved the direction this novel went into. As I said, I was surprised but it was a very good surprise. I actually think it was in line with the development Pip has been going through and while some thought her actions were out of character I don’t agree with that. Yes, Pip from book 1 would never act this way, but the Pip that has gone through all that book 3 Pip has gone through? Yes I can see her acting this way for sure!

“Pip couldn’t escape death, even on this bright late August morning in an unguarded moment with her dad. It seemed to be all she lived for now.”

The only thing I was a little bit disappointed in was the last bit of the book, that seemed a bit weird and not completely in line with what we would expect from these characters. I’m not saying it was completely out of character but I think it could’ve been handled a little bit differently. Overall though, I loved this book! It was a pretty big book but I flew through it. This was all I could hope for in a conclusion, maybe even more than I was hoping for. I can see why some people don’t like it, but for me it was amazing and I would highly recommend it. If you read it, please let me know your thoughts!!

YA Review: As Good As Dead

Title: As Good As Dead (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #3) Author: Holly Jackson Edition: Paperback Rating: 5/5

The final book in the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder trilogy was a must-read for me. I enjoyed the first two books, and I was looking forward to meeting schoolgirl detective Pip Fitz-Amobi, her boyfriend Ravi, her wonderfully supportive family, and the residents of Little Kilton again for another investigation.

Pip isn’t intending to investigate another local mystery. She’s heading to university in Cambridge at the end of the summer, and she is still haunted by memories of her two previous cases. But when she unearths a connection between events in Little Kilton and a convicted serial killer, she can’t resist digging deeper.

Throughout the book her relationship with Ravi continues to develop, and they make an adorable couple. It is wonderful to see the friends she’s made, and the people she’s helped during her investigations come together to support her – but she’s made enemies as well as friends, and her list of local suspects keeps growing.

The case quickly becomes personal, and the stakes are higher than ever as Pip works to connect the fragments of evidence and find out what really happened – and who is threatening her as she goes public with another true-crime podcast.

I’ve enjoyed all three books in the series, but this is definitely the best. We are drawn into Pip’s investigation, and to the danger she faces. There are some truly heart-pounding scenes, and plenty of tension, deception, and eureka moments. Pip’s reactions to her previous cases and the lasting trauma she carries with her feel real – she’s not a hard-boiled detective, and we never lose sight of the fact that she’s still a teenager, at the very beginning of her adult life. As she unearths evidence, she is also discovering which adults, and which authority figures, can be trusted – and who has something to hide.

You’ll need to read the first two books in order to understand the context for this story, but the series is perfect for binge reading. Highly recommended!

Have you read As Good As Dead? What did you think of the final book in the series? Do you want more from Pip, or are you happy that the story ends here? Click through to the full blog to access the comments section, and share your thoughts! No spoilers, though – you can post those on GoodReads !

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Review: As Good As Dead (A Good Girls’ Guide to Murder #3) by Holly Jackson

Say hello to the worst book I have read this year—-and frankly, the last decade. I have had books that I did not finish and books that just left me feeling lukewarm or even disappointed but none have left me feeling absolute shock and frustration. The second book in the series had me feeling a little bland about Pip as a main character so when this one came out, I wasn’t really chomping at the bit to read it but a friend of mine read it and basically said it was awful but she wanted to discuss with someone—-so here we are, thank you peer pressure.

As you move into reading my review of this one, know that I normally don’t post spoilers but frankly there is no way around that for this review. If you haven’t read the other books or you are planning on reading this one you might want to skip my review all together as there WILL be spoilers. So consider yourself warned.

Normally, if I am not feeling a book, I usually set it down and shelf it as DNF, but in this case there was just so much wrong with this book that I felt obligated to read until the end with the hope that it would improve but sadly it did not. I also try to refrain from fully ripping a book as I try to be respectful of authors and their creative license, and that still remains true in this case, there are good points but they did not balance out enough for me to even remotely enjoy this final installment.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SERIES The highly-anticipated finale to the A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series, the instant bestsellers that read like your favorite true crime podcast or show. By the end of this mystery series, you’ll never think of good girls the same way again…

Soon the threats escalate and Pip realizes that someone is following her in real life. When she starts to find connections between her stalker and a local serial killer caught six years ago, she wonders if maybe the wrong man is behind bars.

Police refuse to act, so Pip has only one choice: find the suspect herself—or be the next victim. As the deadly game plays out, Pip discovers that everything in her small town is coming full circle . . .and if she doesn’t find the answers, this time she will be the one who disappears. . . (summary from Goodreads)

SPOILERS BELOW SPOILERS BELOW SPOILERS BELOW SPOILERS BELOW

Consider your self warned again…..spoilers are coming!

This book picks up after the events of book 2, Pip is struggling to come to terms with the death of Stanley Forbes and all the fall out of events with Max Hastings. We find Pip has turned to drugs to cope with the PTSD and rather than reaching out to someone, she uses pills to self medicate and I felt like this was so absolutely out of character for her that I couldn’t even begin to accept it. I tried and tried but I kept coming back to the fact that this just was so out of left field. She’s basically fully on her way to becoming a pill popper on a regular basis and I just couldn’t stand that about her. It just did NOT fit for me. I could buy the PTSD and the teenager approach, but with all the resources and conversations around substance abuse and mental health, especially for teens, this just felt really off to me. Then the murder at the end of book 2 who escaped (literally don’t remember his name) I felt like this book would really focus on resolving that but instead we move to this random serial killer that had no real connection to the other cases in the series. The murder from book 2 just randomly gets arrested and that’s the end of it. So many questions here but the first one would be PARENTS!! Parents you don’t see that your child is struggling? Why not get her into counseling? SOMETHING! ANYTHING! This has been a major problem for me in the entire series like where are the parents!?

The serial killer angle could have saved this book for me—-could have. The book itself started slow but I was really intrigued to have a stalker/serial killer come into play that I was willing to overlook the weird PTSD and self medication in favor of a new case. There wasn’t a lot of build up though. It felt rushed and thrown together with the ‘mystery’ being resolved way too quickly. By the time we get to part 2, essentially half way through the book, Pip is kidnapped by the killer and his identity revealed. The identity was NOT shocking either. But what was shocking was that Pip murders him herself and the second half of the book is basically an instruction manual on how to get away with murder. This felt so absolutely out of character for Pip and it was entirely unnecessary. I cannot even explain how unnecessary it was. Then she proceeds to frame Max Hastings for murder. I cannot stress how wrong this felt to me.

Pip was such a champion of justice and I know ended up being jaded by the criminal justice system throughout the books and I understand with a teenager mind that framing Max Hastings would have seemed like it would be fitting but for me the punishment did not fit the crime for which Max was initially accused. Yes the criminal justice system failed Pip on a number of situations but to frame someone for murder—-a murder she willfully committed—felt so incredibly wrong to me as a reader. Especially considering that in the first book Sal Singh Wass wrongfully accused and even in this book there was an innocent man already behind bars for the serial killer murders—-it just felt so so so wrong to have her frame someone else even if Max Hastings was an absolute POS. I was genuinely shocked by her choices and I just couldn’t even fathom how or why her character went from good girl to stone cold murderer.

I was so sad. that I hated this book as much as I did. There were moments when I felt like ‘hey this could be a good story’ or ‘hey this is starting to get good’ and then of course a few ‘ohhhhh there is the Pip I loved in book 1’ but sadly those moments were few and fleeting. I disliked more of this book than I actually liked. I have never been so let down in a book before. I have read some disappointing books but this one takes the cake. I loved the first book so so so much and had such high hopes for this series and it just crumbled with each book. Do yourself a favor and stop at book 1, it’s truly the best one in the series.

Book Info and Rating

Format: 459 pages audio book

Published: September 28 2021 by Delacorte Press

ISBN 9780593379851

Review copy provided by personal collection. All opinions are my own and in no way influenced.

Rating: 1 star

Genre: YA, mystery

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Book Review: As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson (A Rant) | SPOILER REVIEW

Sooooo….. I have a lot of thoughts. So many thoughts that I wrote a 1,600+ word Goodreads review immediately upon finishing this book, and that’s why today is my first-ever SPOILER REVIEW.

Yes, this review contains major spoilers for this book as well as the previous two books in the series. If you haven’t read them and you intend to, this is your final warning!

(If this is you, though, maybe check out my other reviews for the first two books?)

My review for book 1

My review for book 2

(I am not responsible for the cringe of my old reviews)

About the Book

Title: As Good As Dead (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #3)

Author: Holly Jackson

Published: 2021

Genre: contemporary, mystery/thriller

Rating: 3.5/5

My Thoughts

If you read my blog at any time during 2020 you’ve probably stumbled across at least one post in which I raved about this series. I absolutely loved the first two books, and I believe I ranked the first book in my top three books of 2020. So of course I’d been waiting to read this one for about a year and a half, and although I was a bit nervous that my 10th-grade judgement was no longer to be trusted, I finally bought the third installment from B&N and devoured it in a few hours.

Was it as gripping as I remember the other two books being? Yes! Was it as good? Well, I have a lot to say so get ready for a long spoiler analysis. I really enjoyed reading this book, but it is definitely my least favorite of the series and man, did it go in a different direction from the other two.

So, AGAD starts off with Pip in not a very good place. She’s still reeling from Stanley’s death at the end of the second book, she isn’t sleeping and she’s secretly buying sleeping pills from what’s-his-name Luke the drug dealer from the other two books. To make matters worse, she’s being stalked. Someone’s been leaving dead birds and headless chalk figures on her driveway, and messages on Twitter and in her email: “Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?”

She goes to the police and they don’t believe her, because this is a YA thriller. She and Ravi continue to investigate, and Pip makes her first mistake. Here’s where my spoiler review is going to start.

So, Pip and Ravi realize that yes, someone is stalking her and they have been right outside her house. They’ve connected to her Bluetooth speakers because they’re so close. They’ve printed through her printer because they’re so close. Yet they decide not to update the police with this information, despite having proof? Yeah, Pip thinks the police won’t believe her because she’s seemingly unstable, but Ravi can corroborate. And when Pip’s whole family was woken up by the metal coming through her speakers… she should have told them what happened.

Not to mention when Pip and Ravi realize that the stalker is probably the DT Killer (don’t ask me why this town has so many serial killers just hanging out in there) who left the same sorts of messages and prank calls for his previous victims. GO. TO. THE. POLICE. WITH. THIS. NEW. SUSPICION. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have that police chief think I’m paranoid than try to sleep at night knowing a killer is watching my house. They know Pip has solved two major mysteries before! They probably somewhat trust her judgement! I can’t imagine they would just brush it off if she presented that article in which it mentioned that the DT Killer had been leaving dead birds and chalk figures for one of his previous victims!

And then the whole Jason Bell thing. I don’t buy it. I just don’t. It very much felt shoe-horned in, and the second they read the Andie Bell email I knew it was him and Pip thinking it was Dan da Silva was just dumb. The Pip we know is smarter than that. But I just don’t buy Jason Bell being the killer… yes it was supposed to be a plot twist, but really there was no indication before that Jason was off. I read the first book a while back, so there might have been something planted, but in the third book there wasn’t. Maybe it’s just the improbability of this town having so many killers in it… but it’s a thriller, I’ll stop.

So Jason Bell is the killer and he’s stalking Pip. Why though? Why her specifically? Why right now? Why did he stop killing people for six years and then start again? Well, I don’t know, but let’s just go with it.

So Pip has very strong circumstantial evidence based off Andie’s email that it was him. Now comes her second huge mistake: not presenting THIS to the police. Yes, the whole point is that she no longer trusts the justice system due to Max Hastings and Billy Karras and Sal Singh yada yada yada but still. Still. Where is your sense of self-preservation, Pip? Show the police the email. Let them at least consider the possibility that she is being stalked by a serial killer. Get a plainclothes policeman to watch her house. Anything logical. But of course, this is still in-character for Pip. She did stuff like this in the previous books.

In a not-very-surprising turn of events, Pip gets kidnapped by Jason and left in the building where he killed the five other women six years ago. He does his villain monologue and confesses to killing Pip’s dog way back in the first book (mwahahahhahaa!) but then he leaves her in there by herself, giving her adequate time to break free and escape.

But then. Here is where things get crazy. Pip is about to leave and go home when she sees Jason come back to the building. So she runs back and kills him. Pip kills someone. Pippa Fitz-Amobi. Okay, okay. So violent murder is a bit out-of-character for Pip, but we know she’s just experienced a very traumatic event and was almost murdered by him, so it is sort of? understandable because we’ve also seen her slowly becoming more and more violent/unstable with the graffiti on Max’s house in the second book, her violent fantasies about him, etc. etc. This has been building up for a while. But then, here is where she makes the worst mistake of all (Well besides killing him) She decides to try to cover it up and involve all her friends in her nefarious plan.

She thinks it won’t be ruled as self-defense because she turned around and came back for him. But the thing is, she was almost murdered and I’m not a lawyer but there could be a self-defense case there. Even if it wouldn’t change the fact that she will face consequences for literally killing someone (again wow, how did she become so morally grey so fast) she’d have a better chance than with what she decided to actually do. Not to mention how much she throws morals out the window despite being such a principled character for the entire rest of the series.

So Pip calls Ravi and asks him to help her cover up the crime scene, and he HAPPILY OBLIGES? What? “Oh of course, my dear sweet girlfriend, you were almost murdered just now and now you need me to help you clean up the crime scene where you just killed this guy? I’ll be right over.”

And then they decide to frame Max Hastings for the whole thing. Which makes no sense. First of all, Ravi. Why would Ravi ever, ever go along with this? Pip I can somewhat rationalize, as we can see how deeply she’s been affected by her previous experiences and how unhinged she has become. She’s already lashed out twice with regard to Max and while first-book Pip probably wouldn’t have, I can see how in the stress of the moment Pip might have the idea to frame Max. But Ravi?

Sal died because he was framed for a murder he didn’t commit. For years the Singhs were ostracized and Ravi was told his brother was a cold-blooded murderer. Only when Pip exposed the truth did they learn Sal’s death wasn’t a suicide, it was the tragic result of someone ELSE framing him.

With this experience, why on earth would Ravi agree to help Pip frame Max? Why would he assist her in becoming just like Elliott Ward, the man who murdered his brother and disgraced his name? I just don’t buy it. It goes against his whole character and backstory.

And of course Pip goes through an entire elaborate plan to cover up her involvement in the crime and incriminate Max Hastings for something he didn’t do, which is just so against everything Pip and Ravi used to stand for, and it just doesn’t make logical sense. Now Pip’s ensnared in this web of lies she created for herself and of course now if one strand breaks she’ll be convicted of something way worse than self-defense. But okay Pip… so you’ve turned into the total anti-hero of your story and made your situation 10x worse in one go.

And how is getting “justice” to Max worth all of this risk? I know the theme is Pip seeking justice outside the legal system and how this has destroyed her, but really. I do not think the audience is supposed to sympathize with Pip, but I’m not sure what the point of the book was overall besides totally destroying these characters we’ve grown to love. And no, Pip, no, framing someone for a murder he didn’t commit is not justice.

The whole aftermath with Pip covering up the story and turning into her evil alter ego was jarring but actually pretty interesting to read. It was disturbing to see the juxtaposition between starry-eyed first book Pip and the podcast she made to expose the truth and now this different Pip and the podcast she made to obfuscate the truth. Thematically it worked, really well. But character-wise, I wasn’t completely on board.

But wow, what a depressing ending. This series really turned around, and I’m still kind of processing it. I miss the Pip I knew and loved from books 1 and 2, but I didn’t ABSOLUTELY hate the direction this book went. I don’t know. Hm. Giving it 3.5-4 for readability because I flew through it in a few hours.

Well, that’s it for my long spoiler rant/analysis. I love this series and these characters, so of course I had a lot to say and I think it warranted a spoiler review.

What did you think of as good as dead what’s your favorite book in the agggtm series let me know in the comment section.

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As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

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As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Hardcover – 28 September 2021

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Book 3 of 3 A Good Girl's Guide To Murder
Print length 464 pages
Language English
Publisher Delacorte Press
Publication date 28 September 2021
Dimensions 21.8 x 4.2 x 15 cm
ISBN-10 0593379853
ISBN-13 978-0593379851
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Delacorte Press (28 September 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593379853
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593379851
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 578 g
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Holly jackson.

Holly Jackson started writing stories from a young age, completing her first (poor) attempt at a novel aged fifteen. She lives in London and aside from reading and writing, she enjoys playing video games and watching true crime documentaries so she can pretend to be a detective. A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is her first novel. You can follow Holly on Twitter and Instagram @HoJay92

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As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Paperback – Large Print, Nov. 9 2021

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Book 3 of 3 A Good Girl's Guide To Murder
Print length 656 pages
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Devour the thrilling series that reads like your favorite true crime podcast or Netflix show!	Meet Pip and uncover the truth behind Fairview’s most famous crime in this addictive must-read mystery.	More dark secrets are exposed in this true-crime fueled thriller.	This fast-paced mystery series is now a three-book hardcover boxed set!	A road trip turns deadly in this addictive YA thriller from bestselling author HOLLY JACKSON

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Dead-eyed. That’s what they said, wasn’t it? Lifeless, glassy, empty. Dead eyes were a constant companion now, following her around, never more than a blink away. They hid in the back of her mind and escorted her into her dreams. His dead eyes, the very moment they crossed over from living to not. She saw them in the quickest of glances and the deepest of shadows, and sometimes in the mirror too, wearing her own face.

And Pip saw them right now, staring straight through her. Dead eyes encased in the head of a dead pigeon sprawled on the front drive. Glassy and lifeless, except for the movement of her own reflection within them, bending to her knees and reaching out. Not to touch it, but to get just close enough.

“Ready to go, pickle?” Pip’s dad said behind her. She flinched as he shut the front door with a sharp clack, the sound of a gun hiding in its reverberations. Pip’s other companion.

“Y-yes,” she said, straightening up and straightening out her voice. Breathe, just breathe through it. “Look.” She pointed needlessly. “Dead pigeon.”

He bent down for a look, his black skin creasing around his narrowed eyes, and his pristine three-piece suit creasing around his knees. And then the shift into a face she knew too well: he was about to say something witty and ridiculous, like--

“Pigeon pie for dinner?” he said. Yep, right on cue. Almost every other sentence from him was a joke now, like he was working that much harder to make her smile these days. Pip relented and gave him one.

“Only if it comes with a side of mashed rat-ato,” she quipped, finally letting go of the pigeon’s empty gaze, hoisting her bronze backpack onto one shoulder.

“Ha!” He clapped her on the back, beaming. “My morbid daughter.” Another face shift as he realized what he’d said, and all the other meanings that swirled inside those three simple words. Pip couldn’t escape death, even on this bright late-July morning in an unguarded moment with her dad. It seemed to be all she lived for now.

Her dad shook off the awkwardness, only ever a fleeting thing with him, and gestured to the car with his head. “Come on, you can’t be late for this meeting.”

“Yep,” Pip said, opening the door and taking her seat, unsure of what else to say, her mind left behind as they drove away, back there with the pigeon.

It caught up with her as they pulled into the parking lot for the Fairview train station. It was busy, the sun glinting off the regimented lines of commuter cars.

Her dad sighed. “Ah, that fuckboy in the Porsche has taken my spot again.” “Fuckboy”: another term Pip immediately regretted teaching him.

The only free spaces were down at the far end, near the chain-link fence where the cameras didn’t reach. Howie Bowers’s old stomping ground. Money in one pocket, small paper bags in the other. And before Pip could help herself, the unclicking of her seat belt became the tapping of Stanley Forbes’s shoes on the concrete behind her. It was night now, Howie not in prison but right there under the orange glow, downward shadows for eyes. Stanley reaches him, trading a handful of money for his life, for his secret. And as he turns to face Pip, dead-eyed, six holes split open inside him, spilling gore down his shirt and onto the concrete, and somehow it’s on her hands. It’s all over her hands and--

“Coming, pickle?” Her dad was holding the door open for her.

“Coming,” she replied, wiping her hands against her smartest pants.

The train into Grand Central was packed, and she stood shoulder to shoulder with other passengers, awkward closed-mouth smiles substituting sorrys as they bumped into one another. There were too many hands on the metal pole, so Pip was holding on to her dad’s bent arm instead, to keep her steady. If only it had worked.

She saw Charlie Green twice on the train. The first time in the back of a man’s head, before he shifted to better read his newspaper. The second time, he was a man waiting on the platform, cradling a gun. But as he boarded their car, his face rearranged, lost all its resemblance to Charlie, and the gun was just an umbrella.

It had been three months and the police still hadn’t found him. His wife, Flora, had turned herself in to a police station in Duluth, Minnesota four weeks ago; they had somehow gotten separated while on the run. She didn’t know where her husband was, but the rumors circulating online were that he’d managed to make it across the border to Canada. Pip looked out for him anyway, not because she wanted him caught, but because she needed him found. And that difference was everything, why things could never go back to normal again.

Her dad caught her eye. “You nervous about the meeting?” he asked over the screeching of the train’s wheels as it slowed into Grand Central. “It will be fine. Just listen to Roger, OK? He’s an excellent lawyer. Knows what he’s talking about.”

Roger Turner was an attorney at her dad’s firm who was the best at defamation cases, apparently. They found him a few minutes later, waiting outside the old redbrick conference center, where the meeting room was booked.

“Hello again, Pip,” Roger said, holding out his hand to her. Pip quickly checked her hand for blood before shaking his. “Nice weekend, Victor?”

“It was, thank you, Roger. And I have leftovers for lunch today, so it’s going to be an excellent Monday too.”

“I suppose we better head in, then, if you’re ready?” Roger asked Pip, checking his watch, his other hand gripping a shining briefcase.

Pip nodded. Her hands felt wet again, but it was sweat. It was only sweat.

“You’ll be fine, darling,” her dad told her, straightening out her collar.

“Yes, I’ve done thousands of mediations.” Roger grinned, swiping back his gray hair. “No need to worry.”

“Call me when it’s done.” Pip’s dad leaned down to bury a kiss in the top of her hair. “I’ll see you at home tonight. Roger, I’ll see you in the office later.”

“Yes, see you, Victor. After you, Pip.”

They were in meeting room 4E, on the top floor. Pip asked to take the stairs because if her heart was hammering for that reason, it wasn’t hammering for any other reason. That’s how she rationalized it, why she now went running anytime she felt her chest tighten. Run until there was a different kind of hurt.

They reached the top, old Roger puffing several steps behind her. A smartly dressed man stood in the corridor outside 4E, smiling when he saw them.

“Ah, you must be Pippa Fitz-Amobi,” he said. Another outstretched hand, another quick blood check. “And you, her counsel, Roger Turner. I’m Hassan Bashir, and for today I am your independent mediator.”

He smiled, pushing his glasses up his thin nose. He looked kind, and so eager he was almost bouncing. Pip hated to ruin his day, which she undoubtedly would.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, clearing her throat.

“And you.” He clapped his hands together, surprising Pip. “So, the other party is in the meeting room, all ready to go. Unless you have any questions beforehand.” He glanced at Roger. “I think we should probably get started.”

“Yes. All good.” Roger sidestepped in front of Pip to take charge as Hassan ducked back to hold open the door to 4E. It was silent inside. Roger walked through, nodding thanks to Hassan. And then it was Pip’s turn. She took a breath, arching her shoulders, and then let it out through gritted teeth.

She stepped into the room and his face was the first thing she saw. Sitting on the opposite side of the long table, his angular cheekbones in a downward point to his mouth, his messy swept-back blond hair. He glanced up and met her eyes, a hint of something dark and gloating in his.

Max Hastings.

Pip’s feet stopped moving. She didn’t tell them to; it was like some primal, unspoken knowledge, that even one more step would be too close to him.

“Here, Pip,” Roger said, pulling out the chair directly opposite Max, gesturing her down into it. Beside Max, across from Roger, was Christopher Epps, the same attorney who’d represented Max in his trial. Pip had last come face to face with this man on the witness stand; she’d been wearing this exact same suit while he hounded her with that clipped bark of a voice. She hated him too, but the feeling was lost, subsumed by her hatred for the person sitting opposite her. Only the width of a table between them.

“Right. Hello, everyone,” Hassan said brightly, taking his assigned chair at the head of the table, in between the two parties. “Let’s get the introductory bits out of the way. My role as mediator means I’m here to help you reach an agreement and a settlement that is acceptable to both parties. My only interest is to keep everyone here happy, OK?”

Clearly Hassan had not read the room.

“The purpose of a mediation is essentially to avoid litigation. A court case is a lot of hassle, and very expensive for all involved, so it’s always better to see if we can come to some arrangement before a lawsuit is even filed.” He grinned, first to Pip’s side of the room, and then to Max’s. A shared and equal smile.

“If we cannot reach an agreement, Mr. Hastings and his counsel intend to bring a libel lawsuit against Miss Fitz-Amobi, for a tweet and a blog post shared on April thirtieth of this year, which they claim consisted of a defamatory statement and audio file.” Hassan glanced at his notes. “Mr. Epps, on behalf of the claimant, Mr. Hastings, says the defamatory statement has had a very serious effect on his client, both in terms of mental well-being and irreparable reputational damage. This has, in turn, led to financial hardship, for which he is seeking damages.”

Pip’s hands balled into fists on her lap, knuckles erupting out of her skin like a prehistoric backbone. She didn’t know if she could sit here and listen to all this, she didn’t fucking know if she could do it. But she breathed and she tried, for her dad and Roger, and for poor Hassan over there.

On the table, in front of Max, was his obnoxious water bottle, of course. Cloudy dark-blue plastic with a flick-up rubber spout. Not the first time Pip had seen him with it; turns out that in a town as small as Fairview, running routes tended to converge and intersect. She’d come to expect it now, seeing Max out on his run when she was on hers, almost like he was doing it on purpose somehow. And always with that fucking blue bottle.

Max saw her looking at it. He reached for it, clicked the button to release the spout with a snap, and took a long, loud sip from it, swilling it around his mouth. His eyes on her the entire time.

Hassan loosened his tie a little. “So, Mr. Epps, if you would like to kick things off here with your opening statement.”

“Certainly,” Epps said, shuffling his papers, his voice just as sharp as Pip remembered. “My client has suffered terribly since the libelous statement Miss Fitz-Amobi put out on the evening of April thirtieth, especially since Miss Fitz-Amobi has a significant online presence, amounting to more than 300,000 followers at the time. My client has a top-tier education from a very reputable college, meaning, he should be a very attractive candidate for graduate jobs.”

Max sucked from his water bottle again, like he was doing it to punctuate the point.

“However, these last few months, Mr. Hastings has struggled to find employment at the level to which he deserves. This is directly due to the reputational harm that Miss Fitz-Amobi’s libelous statement has caused. Consequently, my client still has to live at home with his parents, because he cannot find an appropriate job and therefore cannot pay rent to live in New York.”

Oh, poor little serial rapist, Pip thought, speaking the words with her eyes.

“But the harm has not been my client’s alone,” Epps continued. “His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hastings, have also suffered from the stress, and have even recently had to leave town to stay at their second home in Santa Barbara for a couple of months. Their house was vandalized the very same night Miss Fitz-Amobi published the defamatory statement; someone graffitied the front of their home with the words ‘Rapist, I will get you--’ ”

“Mr. Epps,” Roger interrupted, “I hope you are not suggesting that my client had anything to do with that vandalism. The police have never even spoken to her in connection with it.”

“Not at all, Mr. Turner.” Epps nodded back. “I mention it because we can surmise a causal link between Miss Fitz-Amobi’s libelous statement and the vandalism, as it occurred in the hours proceeding that statement. Consequently, the Hastings family does not feel safe in their own home and have had to fit security cameras to the front of the house. I hope this goes some way in explaining not only the financial hardship Mr. Hastings has suffered, but also the extreme pain and suffering felt by him and his family in the wake of Miss Fitz-Amobi’s malicious, defamatory statement.”

“Malicious?” Pip said, heat rising to her cheeks. “I called him a rapist and he is a rapist, so--”

“Mr. Turner,” Epps barked, voice rising, “I suggest you advise your client to keep quiet and remind her that any defamatory statements she makes now could be classified as slander.”

Hassan held up his hands. “Yes, yes, let’s just everyone take a breather. Miss Fitz-Amobi, your side will have the chance to speak later.” He loosened his tie again.

“It’s all right, Pip, I’ve got this,” Roger said quietly to her.

“I will remind Miss Fitz-Amobi,” Epps said, not even looking at her, his gaze on Roger instead, “that three months ago my client faced trial in court and was found not guilty on all charges. Which is all the proof you need that the statement made on April thirtieth was, in fact, defamatory.”

“All that being said”--Roger now stepped in, shuffling his own papers--“a statement can only be libelous if it is presented as fact. My client’s tweet reads as follows: Max Hastings trial final update. I don’t care what the jury believes: he is guilty.” He cleared his throat. “Now, the phrase I don’t care clearly places the following statement as a subjective one, an opinion, not fact--”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” Epps cut in. “You’re trying to fall back on the opinion privilege? Really? Please. The statement was clearly worded as fact, and the audio file presented as though it were actually real.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (Nov. 9 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 656 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593584015
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593584019
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 612 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.57 x 2.59 x 23.37 cm
#81 in Young Adult Nonfiction on Prejudice
#114 in Law & Crime Thrillers for Young Adults
#160 in Young Adult Fiction on Prejudice & Racism

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As Good as Dead Summary, Characters and Themes

In the gripping climax of the “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” trilogy, “As Good as Dead,” set in the quaint, yet deceptive town of Fairview, Connecticut, we are plunged into a tale where justice and evil intertwine.

This contemporary story unfolds over an August, its timeline stretching into the following year, and is masterfully told through a limited third-person perspective focused on Pip Fitz-Amobi, an audacious 18-year-old high school senior.

Full Summary

Our journey begins in the aftermath of a spring marred by controversy. Pip, now a seasoned true crime podcast producer, faces the dire consequences of her previous investigations.

She is embroiled in a libel lawsuit filed by Max Hastings, a serial rapist acquitted in her last exposé, reflecting a legal system fraught with failure and injustice.

Pip’s relentless pursuit of truth leads her to release a recorded phone confession of Max on her podcast, inadvertently shifting the public’s scrutiny onto her.

Concurrently, she becomes the target of a sinister stalker, who leaves behind chilling tokens: dead pigeons, cryptic chalk drawings, and ominous emails.

This pattern, eerily reminiscent of the modus operandi of the infamous DT Killer, known for his duct tape-laden strangulation method, sets a foreboding tone.

As the threat escalates, Pip finds herself isolated, her pleas for help ignored by both the police and her own parents. In a shocking twist, she is abducted by her stalker, who is none other than Jason Bell, father of Andie Bell — the subject of Pip’s first podcast season. Jason, thought to be incarcerated, is in fact the real DT Killer.

Pip’s tale takes a dark turn as she escapes and makes a harrowing decision: she cannot rely on a flawed justice system to deal with Jason. In a desperate bid for justice, she kills him with a hammer.

The aftermath is a frantic cover-up, where Pip, with the help of her boyfriend Ravi and friends, cleans the crime scene, manipulates evidence, and implicates Max in the murder.

The novel delves deep into Pip’s psyche, exploring her conviction that her actions, though extreme, are justified.

She sees Jason’s death as retribution for the tragedies of her past investigations and deems Max’s framing as fitting for a man who has evaded justice repeatedly. As Max is convicted a year later, Pip experiences a complex mix of relief and closure, ready to move on from the shadows of her past.

Her reunion with Ravi, after a strategic separation to avoid suspicion, marks the end of her tumultuous journey.

Pip Fitz-Amobi

Pip is the 18-year-old protagonist, a high school senior deeply engaged in true crime investigation through her podcast series. Intelligent, resourceful, and driven, she finds herself grappling with the flawed justice system after being sued for libel. Pip’s journey takes a dark turn as she becomes the target of a stalker and murderer, leading her to take extreme measures for what she believes is justice.

Max Hastings

Max is the antagonist, a serial rapist who was acquitted in Pip’s previous investigation. He sues Pip for libel, embodying the failures of the legal system. His character is central to the themes of justice and the impact of Pip’s actions.

Revealed as the DT Killer, Jason Bell is the father of Andie Bell, the subject of Pip’s first podcast season. Initially presumed to be in jail, his emergence as Pip’s stalker and abductor adds a sinister twist to the story. His character challenges Pip’s moral compass and catalyzes her transformation.

Ravi

Ravi, Pip’s boyfriend, stands as a pillar of support and an accomplice in her endeavors. His involvement in the cover-up of Jason Bell’s murder and the framing of Max Hastings illustrates his deep commitment to Pip, despite the moral ambiguities of their actions.

Andie Bell

Although not actively present in the narrative, Andie Bell’s character is significant as the subject of Pip’s first-season podcast. Her story is the foundation of Pip’s journey into true crime and indirectly influences the events of this novel.

Pip’s Parents

Pip’s parents are secondary characters who depict the typical concerns and fears of parenthood. They are unaware of the depth of Pip’s involvement in her investigative pursuits and are unable to protect her from the dangers she faces.

1. The Flaws of the Legal System and the Quest for Justice

The book delves deeply into the imperfections of the legal system, a recurrent theme that forms the backbone of Pip’s story.

The novel portrays a system fraught with failures, where the guilty often walk free while the innocent suffer. This theme is embodied in the character of Max Hastings, a serial rapist who, despite overwhelming evidence, is acquitted, highlighting the system’s inability to deliver justice.

The protagonist Pip, a true crime podcaster, becomes disillusioned with the legal process, fueling her quest to seek justice outside the law.

This theme is not just a critique of the legal system’s inefficiencies but also a reflection of the protagonist’s moral dilemma, where she grapples with the idea of taking the law into her own hands.

The novel provokes readers to question the effectiveness of legal institutions and the ethical implications of seeking vigilante justice.

2. The Psychological Impact of Trauma and Obsession

The novel skillfully explores the psychological toll of trauma and obsession. Pip’s journey is marked by an intense fixation on uncovering the truth and bringing the guilty to justice.

This obsession, while initially a noble pursuit, gradually consumes her, blurring the lines between right and wrong. The trauma of her past encounters, especially being stalked and targeted by the DT Killer, deeply affects her mental state, leading her to make decisions that are morally ambiguous.

The author uses Pip’s character to delve into the psyche of someone who, in the pursuit of justice, becomes enveloped in darkness, raising questions about the cost of obsession and the lingering effects of trauma.

This theme is a poignant reminder of how individuals coping with traumatic experiences can find themselves on a path they never intended to take.

3. The Nature of Evil and Moral Ambiguity

Throughout the novel, the nature of evil and the ambiguity of moral choices are central themes.

The novel challenges the conventional understanding of evil by presenting characters who embody various shades of moral complexity. The DT Killer, for example, is an embodiment of pure evil, yet his connection to Pip’s past investigations adds layers to his character.

On the other hand, Pip’s transformation from a seeker of truth to someone who takes a life, albeit in self-defense, forces readers to confront the unsettling notion that even well-intentioned actions can lead to morally questionable outcomes.

This exploration of moral ambiguity is pivotal, as it underscores the idea that the distinction between good and evil is not always clear-cut.

The author invites readers to ponder the complexities of human nature and the circumstances that can lead ordinary people to commit extraordinary acts, blurring the lines between hero and villain.

Final Thoughts

“As Good as Dead” is more than just a crime novel; it’s a nuanced exploration of the blurred lines between right and wrong, justice and revenge, set against the backdrop of a seemingly idyllic town.

This thrilling conclusion to the trilogy leaves readers questioning the true nature of justice and the lengths one might go to achieve it.

A team of Editors at Books That Slay.

Passionate | Curious | Permanent Bibliophiles

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As good as dead: the finale to a good girl's guide to murder.

Parents say (3)
Kids say (26)

Based on 26 kid reviews

Let me just say... WOW!

This title has:

Educational value

Report this review

More scary than inappropriate, if it's called "as good as dead" expect violence.

Too much swearing
Too much drinking/drugs/smoking

good but not as good as the first two

Too much violence

READ THIS REVIEW!!!!!!!!

Great messages
Great role models

SPOLERS BELOW. this book was a lot more harsh than the other ones. the main character gets kidnapped by a serial killer- which is terrifying- and then murders the man who kidnapped her. I kept reading this book because I was very invested in the main character, but I can see why some people don’t love this book. There is some swearing, but not a ton, and the violence in it isn’t too graphic. overall- I loved this book, but the maturity level of the kid defined should be considered

This book was great!! Thrilling plot twists could not let me put this book down. And you can't help but adore Pip and Ravi!!

‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol’ Has a Stellar First Episode

The Tribeca Film Festival screened the first episode of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol , and it was an incredible first episode of season 2! The hit series is part of The Walking Dead universe and has a storied history with fans, especially with Carol and Daryl.

The series doesn’t premiere until September, but fans (and journalists who are … also fans) were given a chance to see Melissa McBride’s return to the series as Carol Peletier, as she searches for her friend, Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus). To not give anything away about the premiere episode, I will say that the tone feels very much as you’d expect from both of these characters.

Carol (who is still back in America) is right where we left her as she searches for Daryl, while Daryl is back in France. Coming off of a show like The Ones Who Live that instantly gave fans satisfaction, it seems as if The Book of Carol is providing The Walking Dead fans with a bit more of a slow burn (story structure-wise).

The thing that really worked with the first episode was that it gave us Carol back in action. While there was some Daryl and we saw a bit of how the back and forth of the season could shape up, the first episode really leaned heavily into McBride’s return to the franchise—which is, arguably, what fans want out of The Book of Carol .

A key part of what has made many of us excited about these spinoff shows is the ability to put two core characters from The Walking Dead together, and it’s nice finally having Carol and Daryl in the same show again.

How we’ve missed Daryl and Carol

Carol looking over her shoulder standing in front of Daryl's bike

The Walking Dead: Dead City and The Ones Who Live had character pairings in them that either expanded on an already rich history (like that of Maggie and Negan) or reunited a husband and his wife (with Rick Grimes and Michonne). Daryl Dixon threw Daryl across the ocean and left him completely alone as a fish out of water.

Folding Carol into the mix brings a familiarity that season 1 didn’t have that isn’t a knock on the first season—it was brilliant—but it does show how much fans love these two characters that they were doubly as excited for the second season. And the first episode felt a bit like we were back in the old days. Carol and Daryl weren’t together, but they were both there, working towards something and trying to get back to one another by doing whatever they had to.

It feels like pulling teeth to wait months for the second episode. That first one really worked to bring us back to Carol and set up where the rest of the season could potentially go, and it got me extremely excited for what The Book of Carol has to offer. I just … want more now.

The Office cast in 'A Benihana Christmas'

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How Beautiful We Were

By imbolo mbue.

Following her 2016 debut, “ Behold the Dreamers ,” Mbue’s sweeping and quietly devastating second novel begins in 1980 in the fictional African village of Kosawa, where representatives from an American oil company have come to meet with the locals, whose children are dying because of the environmental havoc (fallow fields, poisoned water) wreaked by its drilling and pipelines. This decades-spanning fable of power and corruption turns out to be something much less clear-cut than the familiar David-and-Goliath tale of a sociopathic corporation and the lives it steamrolls. Through the eyes of Kosawa’s citizens young and old, Mbue constructs a nuanced exploration of self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and colonialism — these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting.

Random House. $28. | Read our review | Read our profile of Mbue | Listen to Mbue on the podcast

By Katie Kitamura

In Kitamura’s fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can communicate with; falling meanwhile into a tumultuous entanglement with a man whose marriage may or may not be over for good. Kitamura’s sleek and spare prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention, mirroring the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive. Like her previous novel, “A Separation,” “Intimacies” scrutinizes the knowability of those around us, not as an end in itself but as a lens on grand social issues from gentrification to colonialism to feminism. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.

Riverhead Books. $26. | Read our review | Read our profile of Kitamura

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

By honorée fanonne jeffers.

“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” the first novel by Jeffers, a celebrated poet, is many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race and an excavation of American history. It cuts back and forth between the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century, and the “songs” of her ancestors, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who lived through the formation of the United States. As their stories converge, “Love Songs” creates an unforgettable portrait of Black life that reveals how the past still reverberates today.

Harper/HarperCollins. $28.99. | Read our review | Listen to Jeffers on the podcast

No One Is Talking About This

By patricia lockwood.

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A decade after ‘All About That Bass,’ Meghan Trainor aims to make her feel-good songs ‘Timeless’

Ten years ago, Meghan Trainor became a mega-viral pop performer. “All About That Bass” established the then 20-year-old as a new force channeling old sounds, and her public persona became intertwined with the song’s lyrics about body acceptance. Empowerment messages are still at the heart of her specific sound as Trainor releases her sixth studio album, “Timeless” this week. (June 5)

FILE - Meghan Trainor performs on NBC’s Today show at Rockefeller Plaza in New York on Oct, 21, 2022. On Friday, Trainor will release her sixth studio album, “Timeless.” (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)

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This cover image released by Epic Records shows “Timeless” by Meghan Trainor. (Epic via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — Ten years ago, Meghan Trainor was a successful songwriter, soon to become a hit pop performer in her own right. “All About That Bass” established the then 20-year-old as a new force channeling old sounds — a combination of doo-wop with contemporary pop hooks in a time dominated by big synths — and with something to say. Her public persona became intertwined with the song’s lyrics about body acceptance.

“I have my self-love pop bangers that I just do in my sleep,” she told The Associated Press. “That’s my therapy that I need for myself. But it also helps people, so that’s just a win-win as a songwriter.”

On Friday, Trainor will release her sixth studio album , “Timeless.” Empowerment messages are still at the heart of her specific sound but now, she’s matured them to meet where she is in life: as a mother, a sister and a veteran of this business.

The first single, “Been Like This,” featuring her hero T-Pain , even references “All About That Bass.” She sings, “Ooh-wee, she got that booty/That type of boom-boom, that bass that I like.”

Making it the first single? She calls that “destiny,” and is quick to mention that both of her brothers wrote on the song as well. “My mom was sobbing. My dad was crying, like, pretty sure he didn’t know who T-Pain was until I talked about him nonstop,” she says.

Family is at the center of “Timeless” and the music Trainor makes. A mother of two boys, she considers them in everything she does.

“Timeless” by Meghan Trainor. (Epic via AP)

“‘To The Moon’ is for my kid, because he loves rocket ships and outer space,” she says of 3-year-old Barry Bruce Trainor. “A lot of it is inspired by my boys. I want them to have songs that help teach them how to love themselves as they’re growing up, you know, self-confidence and being kind to themselves.”

And it’s for the listener, too, of course. “I Wanna Thank Me,” samples Niecy Nash-Betts’ acceptance speech at the 2024 Emmy Awards, where she said “And you know who I wanna thank? Me, for believing in me and doing what they said I could not do. I want to say to myself, in front of all you beautiful people — Go girl, with your bad self. You did that.”

“I kept writing self-confident bangers, and this was one of the last songs I wrote for the album,” she says, adding that after a while, she didn’t know what else to write about. Then her manager sent her the Nash speech. It was instant inspiration. The day after they wrote it, Trainor sent it to Nash, who filmed herself listening to it while sobbing.

“I had Niecy and her daughter and her wife come over and sing on the album, sing background on the song,” she adds. “So, when you hear all these big vocals at the end, with a bunch of women singing, it’s us.”

“Rollin,’” with its big strings, brass and bass, has a kind of feminist message as well, what Trainor says was inspired by experiences she’s had in the music industry, like watching her manager get called an assistant because she’s a woman. “Any more females in the industry, everywhere, would be sick,” she says.

To protect her peace in this business, she says simply, “ I’m on antidepressants I went up after baby number two, I was losing sleep,” she says. “So, I went up on my medicine and I see my therapist. I try to see her every Wednesday, and I try to vocalize a lot when I’m feeling overwhelmed.”

That relates back to the album. “Timeless,” the title, stems from Trainor’s “big, big, big, big fear of death,” as she puts it.

“When you have kids, you’re like, ‘Oh this is the meaning of life. I have to be here forever,’” she says. “Instead of living in this fear that I have every morning and day and night, I want to live. Like, ‘Wow. We’re so lucky, we’re here. We have all this time together.’ And so that’s why I’m trying to wrap my head around the word ‘timeless.’”

This fall, Trainor will tour for the first time in seven years — also her first time on the road since becoming a mother. “I am in the gym like an Olympian,” she jokes. “I’m going to get in crazy shape and then start practicing.” Dancing and singing at the same time is no easy feat, and “I want to dance a lot,” she says.

Beyond that, her goals are to put on a great show, and to keep her family involved every step of the way. “I’m going to try to make it fun, where each state we get to do something fun with the kids,” she says. “It’s going to be a blast. I’ve lined it up so we can’t not have fun.”

And potentially make some timeless memories?

Newsletters

An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

Synthesia's new technology is impressive but raises big questions about a world where we increasingly can’t tell what’s real.

Melissa Heikkilä on the motion capture stage

Melissa Heikkilä archive page

I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity?

This makes it sound as if I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today it launches a new generation, its first to take advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI, and they are more realistic and expressive than anything I’ve ever seen. While today’s release means almost anyone will now be able to make a digital double, on this early April afternoon, before the technology goes public, they’ve agreed to make one of me.

When I finally arrive at the company’s stylish studio in East London, I am greeted by Tosin Oshinyemi, the company’s production lead. He is going to guide and direct me through the data collection process—and by “data collection,” I mean the capture of my facial features, mannerisms, and more—much as he normally does for actors and Synthesia’s customers.

He introduces me to a waiting stylist and a makeup artist, and I curse myself for wasting so much time getting ready. Their job is to ensure that people have the kind of clothes that look good on camera and that they look consistent from one shot to the next. The stylist tells me my outfit is fine (phew), and the makeup artist touches up my face and tidies my baby hairs. The dressing room is decorated with hundreds of smiling Polaroids of people who have been digitally cloned before me.

Apart from the small supercomputer whirring in the corridor, which processes the data generated at the studio, this feels more like going into a news studio than entering a deepfake factory.

I joke that Oshinyemi has what MIT Technology Review might call a job title of the future : “deepfake creation director.”

“We like the term ‘synthetic media’ as opposed to ‘deepfake,’” he says.

It’s a subtle but, some would argue, notable difference in semantics. Both mean AI-generated videos or audio recordings of people doing or saying something that didn’t necessarily happen in real life. But deepfakes have a bad reputation. Since their inception nearly a decade ago, the term has come to signal something unethical, says Alexandru Voica, Synthesia’s head of corporate affairs and policy. Think of sexual content produced without consent , or political campaigns that spread disinformation or propaganda.

“Synthetic media is the more benign, productive version of that,” he argues. And Synthesia wants to offer the best version of that version.

Until now, all AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make them pretty easy to differentiate from reality. Because they’re so close to the real thing but not quite it , these videos can make people feel annoyed or uneasy or icky—a phenomenon commonly known as the uncanny valley. Synthesia claims its new technology will finally lead us out of the valley.

Thanks to rapid advancements in generative AI and a glut of training data created by human actors that has been fed into its AI model, Synthesia has been able to produce avatars that are indeed more humanlike and more expressive than their predecessors. The digital clones are better able to match their reactions and intonation to the sentiment of their scripts—acting more upbeat when talking about happy things, for instance, and more serious or sad when talking about unpleasant things. They also do a better job matching facial expressions—the tiny movements that can speak for us without words.

But this technological progress also signals a much larger social and cultural shift. Increasingly, so much of what we see on our screens is generated (or at least tinkered with) by AI, and it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not. This threatens our trust in everything we see, which could have very real, very dangerous consequences.

“I think we might just have to say goodbye to finding out about the truth in a quick way,” says Sandra Wachter, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, who researches the legal and ethical implications of AI. “The idea that you can just quickly Google something and know what’s fact and what’s fiction—I don’t think it works like that anymore.”

monitor on a video camera showing Heikkilä and Oshinyemi on set in front of the green screen

So while I was excited for Synthesia to make my digital double, I also wondered if the distinction between synthetic media and deepfakes is fundamentally meaningless. Even if the former centers a creator’s intent and, critically, a subject’s consent, is there really a way to make AI avatars safely if the end result is the same? And do we really want to get out of the uncanny valley if it means we can no longer grasp the truth?

But more urgently, it was time to find out what it’s like to see a post-truth version of yourself.

Almost the real thing

A month before my trip to the studio, I visited Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli at his office near Oxford Circus. As Riparbelli tells it, Synthesia’s origin story stems from his experiences exploring avant-garde, geeky techno music while growing up in Denmark. The internet allowed him to download software and produce his own songs without buying expensive synthesizers.

“I’m a huge believer in giving people the ability to express themselves in the way that they can, because I think that that provides for a more meritocratic world,” he tells me.

He saw the possibility of doing something similar with video when he came across research on using deep learning to transfer expressions from one human face to another on screen.

“What that showcased was the first time a deep-learning network could produce video frames that looked and felt real,” he says.

That research was conducted by Matthias Niessner, a professor at the Technical University of Munich, who cofounded Synthesia with Riparbelli in 2017, alongside University College London professor Lourdes Agapito and Steffen Tjerrild, whom Riparbelli had previously worked with on a cryptocurrency project.

Initially the company built lip-synching and dubbing tools for the entertainment industry, but it found that the bar for this technology’s quality was very high and there wasn’t much demand for it. Synthesia changed direction in 2020 and launched its first generation of AI avatars for corporate clients. That pivot paid off. In 2023, Synthesia achieved unicorn status, meaning it was valued at over $1 billion—making it one of the relatively few European AI companies to do so.

That first generation of avatars looked clunky, with looped movements and little variation. Subsequent iterations started looking more human, but they still struggled to say complicated words, and things were slightly out of sync.

The challenge is that people are used to looking at other people’s faces. “We as humans know what real humans do,” says Jonathan Starck, Synthesia’s CTO. Since infancy, “you’re really tuned in to people and faces. You know what’s right, so anything that’s not quite right really jumps out a mile.”

These earlier AI-generated videos, like deepfakes more broadly, were made using generative adversarial networks, or GANs —an older technique for generating images and videos that uses two neural networks that play off one another. It was a laborious and complicated process, and the technology was unstable.

But in the generative AI boom of the last year or so, the company has found it can create much better avatars using generative neural networks that produce higher quality more consistently. The more data these models are fed, the better they learn. Synthesia uses both large language models and diffusion models to do this; the former help the avatars react to the script, and the latter generate the pixels.

Despite the leap in quality, the company is still not pitching itself to the entertainment industry. Synthesia continues to see itself as a platform for businesses. Its bet is this: As people spend more time watching videos on YouTube and TikTok, there will be more demand for video content. Young people are already skipping traditional search and defaulting to TikTok for information presented in video form. Riparbelli argues that Synthesia’s tech could help companies convert their boring corporate comms and reports and training materials into content people will actually watch and engage with. He also suggests it could be used to make marketing materials.

He claims Synthesia’s technology is used by 56% of the Fortune 100, with the vast majority of those companies using it for internal communication. The company lists Zoom, Xerox, Microsoft, and Reuters as clients. Services start at $22 a month.

This, the company hopes, will be a cheaper and more efficient alternative to video from a professional production company—and one that may be nearly indistinguishable from it. Riparbelli tells me its newest avatars could easily fool a person into thinking they are real.

“I think we’re 98% there,” he says.

For better or worse, I am about to see it for myself.

Don’t be garbage

In AI research, there is a saying: Garbage in, garbage out. If the data that went into training an AI model is trash, that will be reflected in the outputs of the model. The more data points the AI model has captured of my facial movements, microexpressions, head tilts, blinks, shrugs, and hand waves, the more realistic the avatar will be.

Back in the studio, I’m trying really hard not to be garbage.

I am standing in front of a green screen, and Oshinyemi guides me through the initial calibration process, where I have to move my head and then eyes in a circular motion. Apparently, this will allow the system to understand my natural colors and facial features. I am then asked to say the sentence “All the boys ate a fish,” which will capture all the mouth movements needed to form vowels and consonants. We also film footage of me “idling” in silence.

image of Melissa standing on her mark in front of a green screen with server racks in background image

He then asks me to read a script for a fictitious YouTuber in different tones, directing me on the spectrum of emotions I should convey. First I’m supposed to read it in a neutral, informative way, then in an encouraging way, an annoyed and complain-y way, and finally an excited, convincing way.

“Hey, everyone—welcome back to Elevate Her with your host, Jess Mars. It’s great to have you here. We’re about to take on a topic that’s pretty delicate and honestly hits close to home—dealing with criticism in our spiritual journey,” I read off the teleprompter, simultaneously trying to visualize ranting about something to my partner during the complain-y version. “No matter where you look, it feels like there’s always a critical voice ready to chime in, doesn’t it?”

Don’t be garbage, don’t be garbage, don’t be garbage.

“That was really good. I was watching it and I was like, ‘Well, this is true. She’s definitely complaining,’” Oshinyemi says, encouragingly. Next time, maybe add some judgment, he suggests.

We film several takes featuring different variations of the script. In some versions I’m allowed to move my hands around. In others, Oshinyemi asks me to hold a metal pin between my fingers as I do. This is to test the “edges” of the technology’s capabilities when it comes to communicating with hands, Oshinyemi says.

Historically, making AI avatars look natural and matching mouth movements to speech has been a very difficult challenge, says David Barber, a professor of machine learning at University College London who is not involved in Synthesia’s work. That is because the problem goes far beyond mouth movements; you have to think about eyebrows, all the muscles in the face, shoulder shrugs, and the numerous different small movements that humans use to express themselves.

motion capture stage with detail of a mocap pattern inset

Synthesia has worked with actors to train its models since 2020, and their doubles make up the 225 stock avatars that are available for customers to animate with their own scripts. But to train its latest generation of avatars, Synthesia needed more data; it has spent the past year working with around 1,000 professional actors in London and New York. (Synthesia says it does not sell the data it collects, although it does release some of it for academic research purposes .)

The actors previously got paid each time their avatar was used, but now the company pays them an up-front fee to train the AI model. Synthesia uses their avatars for three years, at which point actors are asked if they want to renew their contracts. If so, they come into the studio to make a new avatar. If not, the company will delete their data. Synthesia’s enterprise customers can also generate their own custom avatars by sending someone into the studio to do much of what I’m doing.

photograph of a teleprompter screen with three arrows pointing down to "HEAD then EYES>"

Between takes, the makeup artist comes in and does some touch-ups to make sure I look the same in every shot. I can feel myself blushing because of the lights in the studio, but also because of the acting. After the team has collected all the shots it needs to capture my facial expressions, I go downstairs to read more text aloud for voice samples.

This process requires me to read a passage indicating that I explicitly consent to having my voice cloned, and that it can be used on Voica’s account on the Synthesia platform to generate videos and speech.

Consent is key

This process is very different from the way many AI avatars, deepfakes, or synthetic media—whatever you want to call them—are created.

Most deepfakes aren’t created in a studio. Studies have shown that the vast majority of deepfakes online are nonconsensual sexual content, usually using images stolen from social media. Generative AI has made the creation of these deepfakes easy and cheap, and there have been several high-profile cases in the US and Europe of children and women being abused in this way. Experts have also raised alarms that the technology can be used to spread political disinformation, a particularly acute threat given the record number of elections happening around the world this year.

Synthesia’s policy is to not create avatars of people without their explicit consent. But it hasn’t been immune from abuse. Last year, researchers found pro-China misinformation that was created using Synthesia’s avatars and packaged as news, which the company said violated its terms of service.

Since then, the company has put more rigorous verification and content moderation systems in place. It applies a watermark with information on where and how the AI avatar videos were created. Where it once had four in-house content moderators, people doing this work now make up 10% of its 300-person staff. It also hired an engineer to build better AI-powered content moderation systems. These filters help Synthesia vet every single thing its customers try to generate. Anything suspicious or ambiguous, such as content about cryptocurrencies or sexual health, gets forwarded to the human content moderators. Synthesia also keeps a record of all the videos its system creates.

And while anyone can join the platform, many features aren’t available until people go through an extensive vetting system similar to that used by the banking industry, which includes talking to the sales team, signing legal contracts, and submitting to security auditing, says Voica. Entry-level customers are limited to producing strictly factual content, and only enterprise customers using custom avatars can generate content that contains opinions. On top of this, only accredited news organizations are allowed to create content on current affairs.

“We can’t claim to be perfect. If people report things to us, we take quick action, [such as] banning or limiting individuals or organizations,” Voica says. But he believes these measures work as a deterrent, which means most bad actors will turn to freely available open-source tools instead.

I put some of these limits to the test when I head to Synthesia’s office for the next step in my avatar generation process. In order to create the videos that will feature my avatar, I have to write a script. Using Voica’s account, I decide to use passages from Hamlet, as well as previous articles I have written. I also use a new feature on the Synthesia platform, which is an AI assistant that transforms any web link or document into a ready-made script. I try to get my avatar to read news about the European Union’s new sanctions against Iran.

Voica immediately texts me: “You got me in trouble!”

The system has flagged his account for trying to generate content that is restricted.

screencap from Synthesia video with text overlay "Your video was moderated for violating our Disinformation & Misinformation: Media Reporting (News) guidelines. If you believe this was an error please submit an appeal here."

Offering services without these restrictions would be “a great growth strategy,” Riparbelli grumbles. But “ultimately, we have very strict rules on what you can create and what you cannot create. We think the right way to roll out these technologies in society is to be a little bit over-restrictive at the beginning.”

Still, even if these guardrails operated perfectly, the ultimate result would nevertheless be an internet where everything is fake. And my experiment makes me wonder how we could possibly prepare ourselves.

Our information landscape already feels very murky. On the one hand, there is heightened public awareness that AI-generated content is flourishing and could be a powerful tool for misinformation. But on the other, it is still unclear whether deepfakes are used for misinformation at scale and whether they’re broadly moving the needle to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.

If people become too skeptical about the content they see, they might stop believing in anything at all, which could enable bad actors to take advantage of this trust vacuum and lie about the authenticity of real content. Researchers have called this the “ liar’s dividend .” They warn that politicians, for example, could claim that genuinely incriminating information was fake or created using AI.

Claire Leibowicz, the head of AI and media integrity at the nonprofit Partnership on AI, says she worries that growing awareness of this gap will make it easier to “plausibly deny and cast doubt on real material or media as evidence in many different contexts, not only in the news, [but] also in the courts, in the financial services industry, and in many of our institutions.” She tells me she’s heartened by the resources Synthesia has devoted to content moderation and consent but says that process is never flawless.

Even Riparbelli admits that in the short term, the proliferation of AI-generated content will probably cause trouble. While people have been trained not to believe everything they read, they still tend to trust images and videos, he adds. He says people now need to test AI products for themselves to see what is possible, and should not trust anything they see online unless they have verified it.

Never mind that AI regulation is still patchy, and the tech sector’s efforts to verify content provenance are still in their early stages. Can consumers, with their varying degrees of media literacy, really fight the growing wave of harmful AI-generated content through individual action?

Watch out, PowerPoint

The day after my final visit, Voica emails me the videos with my avatar. When the first one starts playing, I am taken aback. It’s as painful as seeing yourself on camera or hearing a recording of your voice. Then I catch myself. At first I thought the avatar was me.

The more I watch videos of “myself,” the more I spiral. Do I really squint that much? Blink that much? And move my jaw like that? Jesus.

It’s good. It’s really good. But it’s not perfect. “Weirdly good animation,” my partner texts me.

“But the voice sometimes sounds exactly like you, and at other times like a generic American and with a weird tone,” he adds. “Weird AF.”

He’s right. The voice is sometimes me, but in real life I umm and ahh more. What’s remarkable is that it picked up on an irregularity in the way I talk. My accent is a transatlantic mess, confused by years spent living in the UK, watching American TV, and attending international school. My avatar sometimes says the word “robot” in a British accent and other times in an American accent. It’s something that probably nobody else would notice. But the AI did.

My avatar’s range of emotions is also limited. It delivers Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” speech very matter-of-factly. I had guided it to be furious when reading a story I wrote about Taylor Swift’s nonconsensual nude deepfakes ; the avatar is complain-y and judgy, for sure, but not angry.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made myself a test subject for new AI. Not too long ago, I tried generating AI avatar images of myself, only to get a bunch of nudes . That experience was a jarring example of just how biased AI systems can be. But this experience—and this particular way of being immortalized—was definitely on a different level.

Carl Öhman, an assistant professor at Uppsala University who has studied digital remains and is the author of a new book, The Afterlife of Data , calls avatars like the ones I made “digital corpses.”

“It looks exactly like you, but no one’s home,” he says. “It would be the equivalent of cloning you, but your clone is dead. And then you’re animating the corpse, so that it moves and talks, with electrical impulses.”

That’s kind of how it feels. The little, nuanced ways I don’t recognize myself are enough to put me off. Then again, the avatar could quite possibly fool anyone who doesn’t know me very well. It really shines when presenting a story I wrote about how the field of robotics could be getting its own ChatGPT moment ; the virtual AI assistant summarizes the long read into a decent short video, which my avatar narrates. It is not Shakespeare, but it’s better than many of the corporate presentations I’ve had to sit through. I think if I were using this to deliver an end-of-year report to my colleagues, maybe that level of authenticity would be enough.

And that is the sell, according to Riparbelli: “What we’re doing is more like PowerPoint than it is like Hollywood.”

The newest generation of avatars certainly aren’t ready for the silver screen. They’re still stuck in portrait mode, only showing the avatar front-facing and from the waist up. But in the not-too-distant future, Riparbelli says, the company hopes to create avatars that can communicate with their hands and have conversations with one another. It is also planning for full-body avatars that can walk and move around in a space that a person has generated. (The rig to enable this technology already exists; in fact, it’s where I am in the image at the top of this piece.)

But do we really want that? It feels like a bleak future where humans are consuming AI-generated content presented to them by AI-generated avatars and using AI to repackage that into more content, which will likely be scraped to generate more AI. If nothing else, this experiment made clear to me that the technology sector urgently needs to step up its content moderation practices and ensure that content provenance techniques such as watermarking are robust.

Even if Synthesia’s technology and content moderation aren’t yet perfect, they’re significantly better than anything I have seen in the field before, and this is after only a year or so of the current boom in generative AI. AI development moves at breakneck speed, and it is both exciting and daunting to consider what AI avatars will look like in just a few years. Maybe in the future we will have to adopt safewords to indicate that you are in fact communicating with a real human, not an AI.

But that day is not today.

I found it weirdly comforting that in one of the videos, my avatar rants about nonconsensual deepfakes and says, in a sociopathically happy voice, “The tech giants? Oh! They’re making a killing!”

Artificial intelligence

What i learned from the un’s “ai for good” summit.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was the star speaker of the summit.

This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer

A new smart monitoring system could help doctors avoid mistakes—but it’s also alarming some surgeons and leading to sabotage.

Simar Bajaj archive page

Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?

Researchers are using generative AI and other techniques to teach robots new skills—including tasks they could perform in homes.

Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it

OpenAI has reported on influence operations that use its AI tools. Such reporting, alongside data sharing, should become the industry norm.

Josh A. Goldstein archive page
Renée DiResta archive page

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Holly Jackson. Holly Jackson was born in 1992. She grew up in Buckinghamshire and started writing stories from a young age, completing her first (poor) attempt at a book aged fifteen. 'A Good Girl's Guide to Murder' is a YA Mystery Thriller and her debut novel. She lives in London and aside from reading and writing, she enjoys binge-playing ...
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Like the covers, the books get progressively darker as the series goes on. Pip becomes more obsessive over each case, and her world grows a little smaller each time. This claustrophobic atmosphere is cleverly shown in how 'As Good Is Dead' focuses on the events of the first book. It's almost cathartic, to complete the series in such a way ...
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Her romance with Ravi Singh is a much-needed balm, but their love is tragically tested. A particular strength is the way elements in this novel connect with clues from earlier entries. Pip's mother is cued as White and her father, as Black; Ravi is of Indian descent. Intricately plotted and heart-pounding. (Mystery. 14-18)
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Amazon.com: As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder: 9780593379882: Jackson, Holly: Books ... #9 in Teen & Young Adult Thrillers & Suspense (Books) Customer Reviews: 4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 17,097 ratings. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
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Author Holly Jackson. Ratings 4.4 stars on Amazon 4.23 stars on Goodreads Add As Good As Dead at Goodreads.. A Good Girl's Guide to Murder #1 A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (recap) #2 Good Girl, Bad Blood (recap) #3 As Good As Dead (this page) ***** Everything below is a SPOILER ***** What happened in As Good As Dead?. As Pippa Fitz-Amobi is leaving her house, heading to a mediation meeting ...
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Praise for Holly Jackson's A GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER series: "The perfect nail-biting mystery." —Natasha Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author "Holly Jackson plays off of our collective true crime obsession brilliantly." — PopSugar "Gripping."— E! News Online "If you love true crime, murder mysteries, and unstoppable young women, this is the perfect easy-read ...
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Published on 08/10/2022 by The Book Dutchesses. A year after the release I finally read the final book in the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series and today I want to share my thoughts with you all. I loved the first two books and the prequel novella and was so curious to see if As Good As Dead would live up to my expectations.
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YA Book Reviews Index; Editing Services; School Visits and Services; About Us; FREE BOOK! Posted on October 1, 2021 September 27, 2021 by rachel.churcher. YA Review: As Good As Dead. Title: As Good As Dead (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder #3) Author: Holly Jackson Edition: Paperback Rating: 5/5.
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"Twisty, surprising, and absolutely enthralling from page one, there's no better way to end a series."--B&N Reads " As Good As Dead is a phenomenal YA mystery that deserves to be one of the books of the year and provides a stellar finale to a knockout series."--The Nerd Daily Praise for the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series "If you love true crime, murder mysteries, and unstoppable ...
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Books. As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. Holly Jackson. Random House Children's Books, Sep 28, 2021 - Young Adult Fiction - 464 pages. THE MUST-READ MULTIMILLION BESTSELLING MYSTERY SERIES • The final book in the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series that reads like your favorite true crime podcast or show.
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Review: As Good As Dead (A Good Girls' Guide to Murder #3) by Holly Jackson. Say hello to the worst book I have read this year—-and frankly, the last decade. I have had books that I did not finish and books that just left me feeling lukewarm or even disappointed but none have left me feeling absolute shock and frustration.
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Holly Jackson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series. She started writing stories at a young age, completing her first (poor) attempt at a novel when she was fifteen. Holly graduated from the University of Nottingham, where she studied literary linguistics and creative writing, with a master's ...
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(If this is you, though, maybe check out my other reviews for the first two books?) My review for book 1. My review for book 2 (I am not responsible for the cringe of my old reviews) About the Book. Title: As Good As Dead (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder #3) Author: Holly Jackson. Published: 2021. Genre: contemporary, mystery/thriller. Rating ...
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About As Good as Dead. THE MUST-READ MULTIMILLION BESTSELLING MYSTERY SERIES • The final book in the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series that reads like your favorite true crime podcast or show. By the end, you'll never think of good girls the same way again…
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ok a lot less bad as the review said. at first I was like NO! but then my son asked me to read it myself. and sure there was some brief violence and drugs. the violence was brief including the brief rape scene. drugs and brief and lightly used. but the author put in some really nice positive messages throughout the book. Show more. This title has:
As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
This item: As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. ₹1,44700. +. GOOD GIRLS GT MURDER02 GOOD GIRL BAD BLO. ₹1,65785. +. A Good Girl's Guide To Murder Collectors Edition [Special Edition]: A stunning new collectors edition of the first book in the bestselling thriller trilogy, soon to be a major TV series!:
As Good as Dead: TikTok made me buy it! The final book in the
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is The New York Times No.1 bestselling YA crime thriller and WINNER of The British Book Awards' Children's Book of the Year 2020 and shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2020 Pip Fitz-Amobi is haunted by the way her last investigation ended. Soon she'll be leaving for Cambridge University but ...
As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Praise for Holly Jackson's A GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER series: "The perfect nail-biting mystery." —Natasha Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author "Holly Jackson plays off of our collective true crime obsession brilliantly." — PopSugar "Gripping."— E! News Online "If you love true crime, murder mysteries, and unstoppable young women, this is the perfect easy-read ...
As Good as Dead Summary, Characters and Themes
Themes. 1. The Flaws of the Legal System and the Quest for Justice. The book delves deeply into the imperfections of the legal system, a recurrent theme that forms the backbone of Pip's story. The novel portrays a system fraught with failures, where the guilty often walk free while the innocent suffer.
Kid reviews for As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to
There is some swearing, but not a ton, and the violence in it isn't too graphic. overall- I loved this book, but the maturity level of the kid defined should be considered. One of my favorite series and this book is particularly good. Make sure your kids are good with darker topics but should be fine for 14+.
As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Holly Jackson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series.She started writing stories at a young age, completing her first (poor) attempt at a novel when she was fifteen. Holly graduated from the University of Nottingham, where she studied literary linguistics and creative writing, with a master's degree in English.
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As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Praise for Holly Jackson's A GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER series: "The perfect nail-biting mystery." —Natasha Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author "Holly Jackson plays off of our collective true crime obsession brilliantly." — PopSugar "Gripping."— E! News Online "If you love true crime, murder mysteries, and unstoppable young women, this is the perfect easy-read ...
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A Controversial Thriller: ‘As Good As Dead’ Review

Name: As Good As Dead

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AS GOOD AS DEAD

IF HE HAD BEEN WITH ME

IF ONLY I HAD TOLD HER

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Book Series Recaps

What happened in As Good As Dead? (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #3)

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Review | As Good As Dead – Holly Jackson

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YA Review: As Good As Dead

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Review: As Good As Dead (A Good Girls’ Guide to Murder #3) by Holly Jackson

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Book Review: As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson (A Rant) | SPOILER REVIEW

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Well, that’s it for my long spoiler rant/analysis. I love this series and these characters, so of course I had a lot to say and I think it warranted a spoiler review.

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As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Hardcover – 28 September 2021

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As Good as Dead: The Finale to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Paperback – Large Print, Nov. 9 2021

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As Good as Dead Summary, Characters and Themes

Full Summary

Pip Fitz-Amobi

Max Hastings

Ravi

Andie Bell

Pip’s Parents

1. The Flaws of the Legal System and the Quest for Justice

2. The Psychological Impact of Trauma and Obsession

3. The Nature of Evil and Moral Ambiguity

Final Thoughts

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