A Good Girl's Guide To Murder (2024)
Pip’s small English town has been touched by murder. Five years before the opening of A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder, Andie Bell was mysteriously murdered and Sal Singh, Andie’s boyfriend and the guy who supposedly committed the crime apparently killed himself. While the town seems to have moved on a little bit, or at least ignores this dark bit of history, a pall has been cast.
This doesn’t satisfy Pip, who’s not content to be just a normal teenager doing normal teenager things. She knows there’s more to Andie Bell’s murder than meets the eye, and she’s out to find it. Conveniently enough, she’s got an entrance project to do so she can get into Cambridge University, so it’s the perfect excuse to solve a mystery.
Pip’s quest takes her down a deep rabbit hole of intrigue, sneaking around the village, even into homes and bedrooms, where she may stab a stuffed bunny with scissors because there might be something important inside. She’s kind of like Nancy Drew, only with brown hair instead of red, an English accent instead of Midwestern American, and a Volvo station wagon instead of a roadster.
She’s also got a steady partner in crime: Ravi Singh, Sal’s brother, who was suspicious of Pip’s motives at first but then becomes her good friend and confidant. It’s a good thing, too, because Pip keeps getting mysterious threats on her phone and people around the village telling her to back off.
A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder is based on the first installment in the popular YA trilogy by Holly Jackson, which I haven’t read yet except for a few intriguing excerpts. From what I’ve seen on IMDb’s Audience Review page, a lot of the die-hard fans hate the series because it apparently doesn’t stick too closely to the book and changes the characters way too much.
I completely get that; I hated Netflix’s Anne With an ‘E’ because I’ve loved Anne of Green Gables since I was twelve, and to me the Netflix series grossly bastardized L.M. Montgomery’s beautiful work (Read my blog post about that here). So yeah, I have a pretty good idea where the Good Girl fans are coming from.
That said, I mostly enjoyed the series. Emma Myers as Pip strikes a nice balance between wide-eyed teenager and burgeoning detective, and it’s fun getting a glimpse into not only everyday British culture but teenaged British culture. Who knew they still do raves in England, although the series doesn’t call them raves?
On the flipside, the character development is pretty shoddy. Of the little I’ve read so far of the novel, we find out more about Pip in the first five chapters than we do in the entire Netflix series.
I also don’t know why the series had (spoiler alert) Pip engaging in activities that would ordinarily be illegal, such as sneaking into people’s houses, including bedrooms, and pulling a fire alarm to distract a hotel concierge from the front desk so she can steal the very confidential guest registry. She never gets in trouble for it, not even a phone call to her mom and stepdad. I don’t know if those things happened in the book, but seeing them in the series kind of tainted the fun a bit for me. Yeah, they build suspense, but ethics, anyone?
Still, A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder is pretty well-done, and I’m intrigued to read the book, if only to see for myself what the fans are talking about.
A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder is currently streaming on Netflix. Rated TV-MA.
My grade: C
Principal Cast: Emma Myers, Asha Banks, Yali Topol Margalith, Raiko Gohara, Zain Iqbal, Jude Morgan-Collie, Anna Maxwell Martin, Mathew Baynton, Yasmin Al-Khudhairi, Gary Beadle, Henry Ashton, Jackson Bews, Kamari Loyd, Rahul Pattni, Carla Woodcock, India Lillie Davies, Georgia Lock, Orla Hill
Directed by Tom Vaghan.
Written by Poppy Cogan, Holly Jackson (novel), Zia Ahmed, Ajoke Ibironke, and Ruby Thomas.