As Good as Dead, Reviewed

As Good as Dead is the last book in the thriller trilogy A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which is also the name of true-crime podcast that the main character Pip started doing in the first book.

Pip is now 18 and getting ready to go away to Cambridge University in a few weeks. She is really smart and likes figuring things out and in her podcasts she tries to solve murders. She has lots of listeners and her podcasts are popular.

Pip is like a detective and has trauma from the previous murder cases that she solved. She keeps getting flashbacks, and she feels she needs to solve one more case in order to move on and stop feeling bad.

And then a case appears – but, the thing is, she is the case. She discovers she is being stalked and strange things start happening.

Pip sees headless chalk figures outside on her driveway and dead pigeons are left at her door.

She thinks she is imagining things and going a bit crazy, but then she sees someone has written “dead girl walking” near her house in chalk. She gets phone calls and nobody is on the other end of the line, and also messages like “Who will look for you when you disappear?”

When Pip goes to the police, they don’t believe her because she does not have proper evidence. They think she is imagining things, and she is very angry at them.

She does research and makes a link between what is happening to her, and a serial killer who had killed five women in the past. His nickname was the “DT Killer”, or “duct tape killer”, because he taped up his victims.

He is supposed to be in jail, but Pip already knows that the wrong person was arrested for those murders. I am not going to say what happened next, as I don’t want to put any spoilers in.

The plot was full of clever twists and turns. It was not just all waiting for something to happen, it was all story. So even though it was quite a long book this was not a problem for me.

I don’t get scared that easily but I think people that do get scared easily or are a bit squeamish should not read this book.

I did not read the first two books and I think you do need to read them before this one because I was a little lost with what had previously happened.

I would definitely read the other two books after having read this.

I think Holly Jackson is a very good writer because she kept me in suspense but not so much that it became boring – it moves along at a good pace.

The writing is easy to understand, but again, you need to read the other two books to understand well.

Still, I was able to follow the story and I would give it a nine out of 10. If I had read the other two books first I would have given it a 10.

Know a book reviewer, aged between 7 and 12 years, who would like to tell the world whether a recent release is the best or the worst or just meh? Please get in touch with Claudia Dalby at claudia@dublininquirer.com.