As Good As Dead

Holly Jackson's As Good As Dead closes the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder trilogy with its darkest chapter. Pip Fitz-Amobi has solved two cases and paid a personal cost for each. Now someone is targeting her. What began as a school project has reshaped her life, and this final installment forces her to confront whether the justice she chased has made her safer or just more dangerous to know.

Jackson writes a tighter, more claustrophobic thriller here than in the previous books. The stakes are personal rather than civic, and the pacing rarely lets up. Readers who followed Pip from the beginning will feel the weight of her accumulated trauma. This is not a triumphant finale so much as an honest one.

Best read after the first two books in the trilogy. A strong close to a series that treats its teenage protagonist as a complex, fully realised person.