Recently made into a series for British TV, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (2019) by Holly Jackson was recommended to me about a year ago…and it’s taken almost that long for it to be available at my local library, its popularity no doubt enhanced by recently coming to wider public awareness.

Five years ago, 17 year-old Andie Bell disappeared from the small town of Little Kilton. Within a couple of hours, her car was found abandoned in a side street, the boot containing traces of blood. Her boyfriend Sal Singh’s fingerprints were also found all over the car, and he quickly became the prime suspect — a turn of events apparently justified when he texted an admission to his father and then killed himself in the local woodland. Pippa Fitz-Amobi, however, remains unconvinced that Sal was guilty, and as part of her EPQ project decides to look into the crime and subsequent investigation…and, wouldn’t you know it, suddenly all sorts of secrets and lies begin to creep into the light.

One of the many strengths of Jackson’s novel is the canny way the plot is progressed: Pippa conducts interviews and investigates the case documents — acquired under a Freedom of Information Act request — which are entered up in the production log for her EPQ, a clever framing which allows us a little more insight into her thoughts and emotions. It has one slight drawback in that certain characters are introduced only as lines of speech in an interview document — when someone reveals they’re in a relationship with one of the key suspects, I initially had no idea who that person was because we don’t actually ‘meet’ them in person until a long way into the book — but Jackson uses the framing well, only occasionally repeating a few minor points as the investigation deepens.

This enables, alongside the third-person chapters which follow Pip as she pursues her investigation, the nifty dropping in of a few clues and the seeding of some information that pays off later in a way that is much less awkward than straight prose might allow. A few classic tropes — Sal’s Indian heritage has him easily labelled as an outsider, a common theme in classic detective fiction — rear their heads along the way, including a dodgy alibi and the apparent banding together of a group to lie to the police in order to protect one of their own.

Additionally, Pippa — an A-grade student applying to Oxford University while also undertaking this investigation — makes for an intelligent investigator, noticing inconsistencies in the testimony of the various people involved, and pursuing her hunches in a way that is both intelligent and feels broadly believable given the restrictions placed upon her. It’s a shame that there’s no real reason for her belief in Sal’s innocence, as that leaves something of a motivational absence at the core of the plot, but, in fairness to Jackson, I was over three-quarters of the way through the book before this occurred to me. The relationship she forms with Sal’s younger brother Ravi proves to be very much the core of the book, with two young people treading awkwardly on painful ground in a way that rings true and was probably very hard to write.

We hit the expected touchstones for a Teen crime-thriller (sex, drugs, the realisation that people aren’t who they appear to be) and things take a slightly Harlan Coben-ish turn in the final third that, I’m sure, had the target audience enthralled. Not that I wasn’t interested — I read this in a single day — but the surprises were, perhaps, a little familiar to my jaded soul. Hell, if you can’t spot the killer on their first appearance, well, lucky you, you have a delightfully surprising time ahead of you…though, even then, Jackson’s double-barrelled ending, while unlikely as all hell, managed to spring one surprise I absolutely did not see coming.

Along the way, too, Pippa learns a great deal about herself and the risks she is willing to take to expose the truth. There’s an interesting scene at a party where she suddenly realises how much danger she could be in, and once more it’s superbly written in how much work Jackson allows the reader to do. The book overall is, it must be said, very well-phrased…

Tears like silent minnows chased down her cheeks, the muscles twitching in her chin.

…and when it gets a little over-written (“Palimpsest upon palimpsest, the original concept of Andie only just peeking out through all the overlaying scribbles.”) it sort of suits the slightly too-grown up activities that Pippa has undertaken.

As a detective novel, then, this has much to recommend it. When someone says “The answer must be somewhere in everything we’ve learned.” they’re…not far wrong. But then the second barrel of that ending is discharged, and things take the sort of turn — unpredictable, utterly bonkers, loads of fun — that marks out the thriller from the detective novel for me and, if I’m being honest, demonstrates why I prefer detection. As a fan of the impossible crime, a subgenre that frequently requires the reader to suspend some of their objections, I feel like this might be a little bit too much to accept, and that in feeding you these unlikely developments Jackson also manages to hide that some rather key questions are not answered in a satisfactory manner…but, then, if I read this when I was 10 years old I’d probably still be raving about it three decades later.

Ultimately, the test of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is whether I see myself reading either of its two sequels, and…I don’t. Jackson writes well, plots intelligently, and has a remarkable acumen when it comes to the use of modern technology in applying reasoning to the more reserved elements of her reversals. But, in the final analysis, the sort of topics this covers and the way it screams through the gears in its closing revelations reminds me why I go for the slightly more sedate detection and clever obfuscation of mysteries aimed at slightly younger readers. Sometimes less is more, and for me that applies very firmly here. But, like I say, as a pre-teen this would delight me. Pick it up for the 11 year-old in your family, and rest assured they’ll be an Agatha Christie junkie before too long.