Weekend Reads: Sharvi Jha's Review of "A Good Girl's Guide to Murder", A Guest Installment of our Mother-Daughter Book Review Series

We are excited to share the next installment of our mother daughter book review series, a series written by Gayatri Aryan and her daughter Aneesha Aryan. We have a guest writer, Sharvi Jha, a family friend of Gayatri and Aryan. She thoughtfully reviews “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder”, a young adult story full of plot twists, family, and more!

I really enjoyed reading Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do. This book will throw you for a loop again and again with so many plot twists you will actually be unable to put it down (many of my responsibilities were put on hold so I could finish this book). It is actually the first of three in a trilogy, and all three books are phenomenal. 

The protagonist, a high school student named Pippa Fitz-Amobi, decides to investigate a closed case from 5 years ago in her small town of  Fairview, Connecticut (in the UK edition, it’s called Little Kilton), as a senior thesis project. It starts out as a small curiosity, just an attempt to gather some information on the case. Pip certainly does not expect to solve the murder of Andie Bell, but she has her suspicions that Sal Singh, the boy who allegedly(!!) murdered his girlfriend Andie, may not be as guilty as the town thinks. Andie’s body was never found, and Sal was found dead in the woods the same night, so the town gave up on ever finding out the whole truth about what happened that night.

Pip decides to go to Sal’s younger brother, Ravi, first. He answers some questions Pip has about his brother and anything else he knows. Pip records every single detail in her log. She makes sure not to miss a thing, which comes in handy later. Ravi is surprised that she doesn’t hate Sal like everyone else. For years he has been forced to hide his grief about the death of his brother, fearing that people would say he was defending a murderer. Ravi knows deep down that his brother could never have done such a thing. He decides to help Pip with her project, a small part of him hoping they can prove Sal was innocent.

Soon, Pip and Ravi become a team, uncovering clue after clue and desperate to clear Sal’s name. They develop a strong friendship because of this, and the school project starts turning into a mission. Pip goes around town interviewing anyone who might know something about the people involved in the case or the events of April 20th, 2014. She interviews her best friend Cara’s sister, Naomi Ward, who was one of Sal’s best friends and one of the people with him that night. Pip talks to Max Hastings, the loathsome friend of Sal who Pip grows to hate and suspect of foul play. Pip interviews other people connected to the case such as Elliot Ward, a teacher at her school and Cara and Naomi’s father.

This case starts to consume Pip. Her family starts to worry about her as it is all she thinks about and causes her a lot of stress and worry, distracting her from important things in her life such as her application to Cambridge University. What Pip doesn’t tell anyone, even her partner Ravi, is that she starts to receive threatening messages from an anonymous person, telling her to drop it before she or someone she loves gets hurt. But Pip is in too deep now to back out. She knows she is getting close, because these messages continue and get more frequent the longer she investigates the case. She even starts to suspect people who she knows and loves, like Naomi. She knows this is wrong, but she is willing to do anything at this point to get to the bottom of it. She breaks into the Bells’ house with Ravi when they are not home and looks around Andie’s room. She looks at Andie’s planner, which has a phone number in it that Pip takes note of. Pip chases sleep and loses friends along the way, but she keeps going. At one point, her beloved dog Barney goes missing. The anonymous person sends Pip a note and tells her to bring her laptop to the woods and destroy all her work and data she collected about the case. They say that if she does this, she can get Barney back. Pip does just that, but unfortunately Barney does not come back and is later found dead in the river. Pip is absolutely destroyed by this, but Ravi encourages her to keep going. Pip recovers all the data she had lost and gets right back to work. It is important to note just how perseverant Pip is, because not many people would continue beyond this point. 

She talks to Becca Bell, Andie’s sister, and gathers some information about the family’s personal home life. She finds out that their father, Jason Bell, was quite a bad father, always making comments about the girls’ appearances and basically telling them that they were only worth their appearances. Pip adds him to the list of suspects, along with Natalie Da Silva, a girl who was bullied by Andie, Daniel Da Silva (a police officer and Natalie’s brother),  and Max Hastings (he had seemed a little too obsessed with Andie before her murder).

Shortly after Barney’s death, Naomi calls Pip to offer condolences about her dog. Pip notices that Naomi is calling from an unknown number. This is because Naomi had broken her phone a couple days ago. But here’s what’s interesting: this number matches the one written down in Andie’s planner. Pip is confused and excited at the same time. She heads right to the Ward house, ready to confront Naomi, thinking she was involved in the murder. Pip finds out that the phone number and the phone actually belonged to Elliot Ward. Something clicks in Pip’s head, and she decides to try something that ultimately leads to her solving the case. She asks to borrow Cara’s computer, and takes a look at what printer it is connected to. Then, she looks at the printing history of the computer, which will allow her to see what has previously been printed there. And that is when she sees it: The threats to her, telling her to stop investigating. She knows right away that she’s got her guy: Elliot Ward. She is saddened to have to do this, Elliot is like a second father to her. But she knows she has to.

You see, Elliot has been going to “tutor” students somewhere in Wendover three times a week. This had previously intrigued Pip: he's already a teacher, he is making a decent wage and doesn’t really need the extra money. But she had thought nothing of it, of course. Except now, it means so much more. Pip “forgets” her phone in Elliot’s car, and she and Ravi GPS tracks its location to find where he has really been going all this time. Once she gets the address, she heads over to the house he is at and calls the police, telling them that she thinks Elliot has been holding Andie hostage all this time and she is about to go to interrogate him. Then, she knocks on the door. Elliot opens the door, pale in the face. He nervously asks Pip what she is doing here, to which she angrily swings the door open and marches right in. “WHERE IS SHE??” Pip yells. “You’ve been keeping her here all this time, haven’t you? WHERE IS ANDIE?” Elliot points up, so Pip quickly climbs up to the attic where she finds a blonde woman, a little heavier looking than Andie and with suspiciously different features than the missing girl.

She tells Elliot that the police are outside and that he had better start talking, so he does. He tells her everything. He tells her that he and Andie had been in a relationship, one that a student and teacher should never have. It had been going on for a while before the guilt overcame Elliot, he knew this was wrong and that he should end it. When he told Andie, she went frantic and started throwing things around in his office. She was furious and upset. In a panic, Elliot tried to stop her and calm her down. Andie ended up falling and hitting her head on the desk. Hard. She stormed out of Elliot’s house and he panicked knowing that she was missing and probably going to report him and get him fired. He looked around for Andie, but of course, he couldn't find her, because by then she was already dead. Becca Bell later tells Pip that Andie had gone back to her house, where Becca told Andie about something bad that Max Hastings had done to her. Hoping for some consolation or comfort, she gets nothing instead. Andie doesn’t seem to care at all. Of course, she wasn’t in the right headspace. Becca was hurt, upset, and angry. Soon, the two got into an argument, which turned into a physical altercation. Andie fell down and started convulsing. Her head injury had just gotten much, much, worse. She vomited, and choked on it. The cause of her death was asphyxiation. Elliot then killed Sal and framed him, making it look like a suicide, to cover up his tracks leading to Andie’s death. Becca, shocked and heartbroken that she had just killed her sister, panicked and dragged Andie’s body to a septic tank inside a barn. Over the years, the body had disintegrated and there were no traces of Andie remaining.

But what about the girl in the attic? Well, it turns out that she was just another girl who had a psychological disorder. Elliot, desperate to find Andie, saw this girl from Milton Keynes a while after the incident. She was walking along the road and so he brought her home. He told her it would be safe for her to live with him. He fed her, let her watch TV and do pretty much anything else she wanted as long as she didn’t leave. The poor girl started to believe she was Andie Bell because of what Elliot had told her.

The police finally come inside and arrest Elliot. Pip is happy but also sad for Cara and Naomi. She knows it will change their lives forever. 

Becca, after telling Pip the truth about how Andie died, drugged Pip’s tea and almost tried to kill her. She came pretty close, too. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be responsible for another person’s death. Pip’s family comes and finds her on the brink of death. She is brought to the hospital where her stomach is pumped and she is saved. Becca is arrested for drugging Pip’s drink and trying to kill her.

The town finds out about Elliot and Becca’s arrests. They know it is about Andie and Sal, but no one has the full truth yet. So a couple months later, Pip and Ravi get up on stage in front of all of Fairview and tell everyone the entire story: start to finish. Sal’s name is finally cleared, a huge relief for the Singh family, and a huge victory for Ravi and Pip.

A happy ending! For now….because this is not the end for Fairview. And definitely not for Pip. In the next two books, the story unfolds into two other cases, where everything comes together at the end of book 3: As Good as Dead. But that’s a story for another time.

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, give yourself a high-five. You now know everything that happens in book 1, but I still recommend that you read it. The other two books in the trilogy are an absolute must.

Bio: Hi! I’m Sharvi Jha. A little about me: I live in Pennsylvania and I’m 15 years old. I absolutely love reading books and will use any excuse to talk about them. That is why I decided to start writing about books I’ve read! A family friend of Gayatri and Aneesha, Sharvi is excited to be a guest contributor of the mother-daughter book review series!