As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
**4.5-stars rounded up**
As Good As Dead is the third, and they claim, the final book in Holly Jackson’s popular A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series.
Personally, I feel like Jackson may not be done with Pip. There’s so much more story that could be told. I’m hoping she pulls a Maureen Johnson, a la The Box in the Woods.
By this point in the series, y’all know, Pip has been through it. This isn’t a cozy YA Mystery series. Pip has faced very real dangers and she hasn’t come out unscathed.
Particularly after solving her last case, she’s left with PTSD surrounding those events. Her emotional state of mind is fairly dark. She’s struggling for real.
Adding to her stress, because like all she’s been through isn’t enough, someone is harassing her.
While Pip is used to trolls, any person with a public presence on the net is, she begins to take special notice when one particular troll asks her the same question over and over: who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?
The harassment quickly escalates and Pip begins noticing things popping up around her house that indicate this person may be close by, watching her. Before long, there’s no question, she has a stalker.
As Pip starts to look into who this person might be, she discovers connections that may link her stalker to a local serial killer case purportedly solved six years ago. Is the wrong man in jail? Is the killer still on the loose? Will Pip be his next victim?
When the police refuse to act on her behalf, Pip does the thing she is best at, she investigates herself. Is she finally in over her head?
It’s no secret that I absolutely love this series. Pip is one of my favorite characters in the literary world, but this novel finds her in a totally different headspace.
Gone is our sparkling baby girl with all the optimism of a newborn pup. The world has beaten it out of her. She’s seen the dark side of humanity in a way many people never do.
I actually really appreciated that aspect of Pip’s mental health being showcased. So many times in books, the protagonists go through incredibly horrific things and just seem to get over it. They bounce back in a way us regular peeps could never even dream of.
The fact that Pip really struggles with recovering from her experiences made her feel that much more real to me. You can really empathize with her character.
The tone of this entire story is much darker than the previous two and I feel like some people may not like it as much because of that. For me, it felt like the natural progression of Pip’s story.
As always, Pip is completely focused on the task at hand, even to the detriment of some of her relationships. I was concerned for a while about her relationship with Ravi; he’s just such a gem.
This one didn’t turn out quite like I was expecting it to. There’s one point where you think the story could be over, but then a huge twists sends it spinning off in a whole new direction.
After this, I wouldn’t say I was crazy about a lot of Pip’s choices, but who am I to judge.
As mentioned above, I would be super stoked if this weren’t really the end. If it is though, I respect Jackson’s decision and think she did an incredible job with this series.
I would definitely reread all of these book again someday. I think it would be really fun to binge them back-to-back. If you haven’t read this series yet, you better get cracking. You don’t want to miss out!!
