Second Viewings: A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder

Hello hello and welcome or welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet. Today sees the start of a new blog post series: second viewings.

While there’s nothing like a great new book, sometimes there’s also nothing like a reread, especially if the gap between book releases is large. This comes about simply because I picked up the third book in the A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder series, and realised that, having read maybe 200 books between them, and a time difference of two years, I had forgotten certain details that were important to the story.

So after a bit of a pause, I came back and started the series from the beginning. I’m not going to rewrite my orginal review, which you can find here, but I’ve got some new thoughts to add having finished it the second time around. This is what second viewings posts will be about, so if you ever see another one, you’re ready for it!

Synopsis
The case is closed. Five years ago, schoolgirl Andie Bell was murdered by Sal Singh. The police know he did it. Everyone in town knows he did it.

But having grown up in the same small town that was consumed by the murder, Pippa Fitz-Amobi isn’t so sure. When she chooses the case as the topic for her final year project, she starts to uncover secrets that someone in town desperately wants to stay hidden. And if the real killer is still out there, how far will they go to keep Pip from the truth?

Second Viewings

• One of the things I really picked up on during this second viewing is just how unpredictable so many of the points of the story were. This is obviously what we all hope for in a mystery, but here it is done with such elegance, that even the second time around, I didn’t see bits coming.
• The Fitz-Amobi family dynamic is utterly adorable and hilarious. Her dad has no hesitations in being ridiculous, and her brother adores her, and later really looks up to Ravi. The parts of the story that see family interaction were some of my favourites, funnily enough, as they do so much to be the counterweight to the unhealthy dynamics we see throughout the pages.
• I also really enjoyed watching the friendship between Pip and Ravi bloom again. They get to a point so quickly where they understand one another, and can relate to what the other is going through, even if they do make small slip ups throughout that journey.
• Once again, Holly Jackson’s beautiful writing and smart ass remarks make this an enjoyable read as well as a complicated mystery to pick at. I found myself smiling as much as frowning (I’m a very expressive reader!) and watching all of the pieces click into place, both with the crime solving side of things and the blooming relationship between Pip and Ravi was a pleasure.
• The ‘interactive’ side of this book is something that really lends itself to being read as a physical text or ebook. I did struggle with the size of some of the font and looked a little bit like Miss Marple with my maginifying glass, but no regrets! Things like the map and the diary entries we get to see really add a 3D element to the story.
• In what was always going to be an interesting mystery to solve, one of the things Jackson manages to do so well is to capture the human aspect of the case. We don’t always see this in murder mystery books, but by involving Ravi, we get a completely different take on things, and this only lends itself in a positive way.

So there we have it. I really enjoying revisiting this book, and I’m already excited to read the next book, Good Girl, Bad Blood, again. I last wrote about these books back in 2000, so it’s a good thing for my memory to be rereading them, and also a curious thing to see how much my review writing process has changed since too.

Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to swing by again soon!