No Andie Bell, no Sal Singh, no Elliot Ward or Becca Bell, no Jamie Reynolds or Charlie Green or Stanley Forbes, and no Jane Doe. The game had changed. While Pip is used to trolls, any person with a public presence on the net is, she begins to take special notice when one particular troll asks her the same question over and over: who will look for you when you're the one who disappears? A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is The New York Times No.1 bestselling YA crime thriller and WINNER of The British Book Awards' Children's Book of the Year 2020.

It's no secret that I absolutely love this series. Pip is one of my favorite characters in the literary world, but this novel finds her in a totally different headspace.

Hobbies

As Good As Dead is the story of two women who meet at a writer’s workshop, claim to be “friends” yet do little to show that except for an occasional moment. They grow distant over the years, with Charlotte harboring a secret that causes stress on their relationship as well as with her husband. I kept waiting for something to happen in this novel and it really seemed to drag for me. Don't get me wrong, this is beautifully written and well researched but I really didn't have any sympathies for the totally unlikable characters! I didn't care what had happened in the past! And it just fizzled out at the end-as I said, where were the fireworks? The tension? Her dad shook off the awkwardness, only ever a fleeting thing with him, and gestured to the car with his head. “Come on, you can’t be late for this meeting.”

A shy girl from a small town and working class family, Charlotte is ecstatic to be accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. She heads to Iowa City to find an apartment and meets the beautiful and beguiling Esme. She and Esme move in together and become best friends. Many years pass and Charlotte is a published author and tenured professor. Her university boyfriend, who was away in Italy completing his doctoral research while Charlotte lived with Esma, is now her husband, and he and Charlotte live a settled life in Tuscon. Charlotte and Esme are no longer friends; Esme moved away from Iowa and stopped answering Charlotte's letters. Out of the blue, an older, fatter, less beautiful Esme turns up at Charlotte's house and all of the wounds she thought had healed from the past reopen, tearing her life apart.

Christmas Gifts

This book was basically me being stressed out and having panic for Pip and then being an emotional angry snowball mess. But that means it made me feel and thats for me the most important thing in a book that it makes me feel and that was what As good as dead delivered. Update: In terms of my critique below, it got worse. But I finished it (skimming a few of the last scenes), so there must have been something keeping me in the story. Not the characters, not the plot -- so it must be the writing itself. In Chapter 52, Max Hastings was arrested, but in Chapter 53 Pip realized that Hawkins still suspected she had something to do with the whole thing. In Chapter 54, Pip broke up with Ravi to keep him out of harm’s way if Max was found guilty at trial and Hawkins needed a new suspect. In Chapter 55, Pip went to Columbia and cut off ties with all her old friends, family, and Ravi, while waiting for the verdict in Max’s trial. In the epilogue, three minutes after Max Hasting’s trial ended, Sal messaged Pip. Pip immediately began to respond. To sum up, this conclusion was interesting and intense but leaning more towards disappointing. I didn’t agree with the direction it took, and I didn’t feel assured by the ending. However, I can understand why it had to go this way, and I didn’t outrightly hate the book. As a matter of fact, I have a lot of admiration towards the series. It’s definitely become my favorite in the YA category. If you’re gearing up to read this book, don’t expect it to be like the first two. Prepare for all the moral dilemma it’ll cause and get ready to be mindblown—whether in a good or bad way, that’s for you to find out. However, these last few months, Mr. Hastings has struggled to find employment at the level to which he deserves. This is directly due to the reputational harm that Miss Fitz-Amobi’s libelous statement has caused. Consequently, my client still has to live at home with his parents, because he cannot find an appropriate job and therefore cannot pay rent to live in New York.”

Without giving really anything a way, the reader should be prepared for a lot of whining and groveling from our dear protagonist. At 40+ years of age, Charlotte still allows her life to be led by Esmè Cole, the aforementioned “friend”. While they haven’t seen each other in years, her mere existence is enough to render Charlotte a fool. But the harm has not been my client’s alone,” Epps continued. “His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hastings, have also suffered from the stress, and have even recently had to leave town to stay at their second home in Santa Barbara for a couple of months. Their house was vandalized the very same night Miss Fitz-Amobi published the defamatory statement; someone graffitied the front of their home with the words ‘Rapist, I will get you--’”

Gone is our sparkling baby girl with all the optimism of a newborn pup. The world has beaten it out of her. She's seen the dark side of humanity in a way many people never do. The last book is definitely different from the previous ones. It's more dark and ominous, capturing Pippa and the emotional toll the past two investigations have had on her. However, the twist of events is too abrupt and far-fetched, I was caught off guard by the shift in tone from book one and two's playful inquisitiveness to this novel's trauma-filled narrative. I enjoyed the first half of the book, and I am surprised that my guess for the culprit is on the beam compared to the last two books. However, the "cover-up" part that takes up the second half was a miss for me. For the most part, I think the writing here was nicely done. I think the author did a fantastic job of capturing the characters, up until the end. And maybe my critique of the end belongs more in the entertainment value portion of the review. The problem I had was with a character who basically abdicates all personal responsibility to her husband and allows him to solve her problems for her. I'm not sure whether I can legitimately consider this a writing issue, because it is in line with how the character behaves historically, but it ultimately means that our protagonist shows absolutely no growth. It's something I'd love to discuss with the author and perhaps understand better. Are we meant to see that Charlotte hasn't changed at all from her graduate school days and has learned nothing from her experience with Esme or is that a flaw in the writing? From what I can tell, we are meant to sympathize with Charlotte, which leads me to lean more towards a flaw in characterization. I must say that I disliked the fact that she still seemed to like Charlie, even after all of the PTSD Stanley’s death caused her and how much she was protesting him committing the act at the time. It was not a display of the Pippa Fitz-Amobi I knew. Pip couldn’t shake this uncanny feeling, that it wasn’t Hawkins sitting across from her, questioning her. It was herself, from a year ago. The seventeen-year-old who thought the truth was the only thing that mattered, no matter the context, no mind to that suffocating grey area. The truth was the goal and the journey, just as it was for DI Hawkins. That’s who was sitting across from her: her old self set against whoever she’d become now. And this new person, she had to win.