A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #1)

by Holly Jackson

The people you love weren’t calculated, subtracted, or held at arm’s length across a decimal point.

And though Pip nodded and smiled when her mom would ask whether she remembered the way her father hummed while he brushed his teeth or how he’d laughed when Pip’s second spoken word was “poo,” she didn’t remember him. But sometimes remembering isn’t for yourself; sometimes you do it just to make someone else smile.

Maybe laughter was one of the very first things you lost

“OK, but quick observation,” Ravi said, holding up his finger. “You’re asking me, the brother of the person everyone thinks murdered Andie Bell, to break into the Bell house? Not to mention the amount of trouble I’d be in anyway as a brown guy breaking into a white family’s house.”

“Real men wear floral when trespassing,” Ravi said, slipping them on and clapping his gloved hands together.

Everything felt staged and stagnant.

A place entombed in five years of grief.

I don’t even know what’s right anymore—everything is so muddled. I’m not sure I’m the good girl I once thought I was. I’ve lost her along the way.

there are a handful of people who carry the blame for what happened that night and the days following, morally if not all criminally. These are: Elliot Ward, Howard Bowers, Max Hastings, Becca Bell, Jason Bell, and do not forget, Andie herself. You have cast her as your beautiful victim and willfully overlook the other layers of her character, because they don’t comfortably fit your narrative. But this is the truth: Andie Bell was a bully who used emotional blackmail to get what she wanted.

“And though this story does have its monsters, I’ve found that it is not one that can be so easily divided into the good and the bad. In the end this was a story about people and their different shades of desperation, crashing up against each other.

there was one final player in this story, Fairview, and it’s us. Collectively, we turned a beautiful life into the myth of a monster. We turned a family home into a ghost house. And from now on we must do better.”