A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder – Season 1 (2024)

If you have been around here for a while, you probably know that I am very willing to give a good YA mystery a chance, and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder had enough going for it on paper to make this one an easy sell. The Netflix series follows Pip Fitz-Amobi, a high school student who decides to investigate the disappearance of Andie Bell for her senior project, five years after Andie was supposedly murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh. Sal then allegedly confessed before taking his own life, leaving the town with a neat little explanation that everyone had accepted. Pip, however, is not convinced, and once she starts digging, the case becomes considerably less neat.

The premise is one of those mysteries that immediately gives you a reason to keep watching. Pip is not a professional detective, she is a teenager with a school assignment, a lot of curiosity, and a questionable willingness to put herself directly in harm’s way. She starts by trying to prove that Sal could not have killed Andie, which leads her to Ravi Singh, Sal’s brother, who has spent the past five years living with the consequences of everyone believing his brother was a murderer. Ravi initially has very little interest in Pip’s investigation, but the two eventually become a team, and their partnership becomes one of the strongest parts of the season.

The investigation itself has plenty of layers. Andie was not the perfect, popular girl that the town remembers, and as Pip starts interviewing her friends and people connected to the case, a much messier version of Andie begins to emerge. There are drugs, secret relationships, blackmail, sexual assault, an inappropriate relationship with an adult, a hit-and-run, and a whole lot of people who have reasons to lie about what happened. Every time Pip thinks she has narrowed down the list of suspects, another piece of information complicates the picture.

That is also where the show captures the appeal of the book series. The mystery gives you enough information to play along with Pip rather than simply waiting for the show to reveal the answer. You can make your own guesses about who is lying, who knows more than they are saying, and whether the people Pip trusts are actually trustworthy. The six episode season moves quickly, and because Pip is constantly uncovering another piece of the puzzle, it is easy to tell yourself that you will watch just one more episode.

Emma Myers is a great fit for Pip. She gives the character the right combination of intelligence, determination, awkwardness, and teenage impulsiveness. Pip is smart, but she is also very much seventeen, and watching her repeatedly make decisions that would have most adults saying, “Absolutely not,” is part of the fun. She has a tendency to believe that if she can just uncover one more clue, everything will fall into place, even when the evidence is making it increasingly clear that she is putting herself in danger.

Zain Iqbal also brings a lot to Ravi, particularly because his character has so much emotional baggage surrounding Andie’s disappearance and Sal’s death. Ravi is not simply Pip’s sidekick. He has his own reason for wanting the truth, and his relationship with Pip gives the investigation an emotional center beyond simply solving a five year old murder.

I also liked the way the show gradually dismantles the version of Andie that the town has created. At the beginning, Andie is remembered as this beautiful, popular girl whose life was cut short, while Sal is remembered as the boyfriend who killed her. As Pip starts investigating, neither story holds up quite as neatly as everyone would like. People have protected themselves, protected other people, withheld information, and allowed assumptions to become accepted as fact. The more Pip learns, the more complicated the original story becomes.

The season also does not shy away from some darker material. Max Hastings and the storyline surrounding the sexual assaults are difficult to watch, and the show makes it clear that some of the people involved have done genuinely awful things. The story involving Andie’s younger sister, Becca, also adds another layer to the case and eventually becomes critical to understanding what happened. This is not a mystery where every character is simply hiding a mildly embarrassing secret. Some of the secrets have serious consequences.

And then there is Pip’s dog, Barney, which is where the show made a very strong argument for why perhaps teenagers should not investigate murders on their own. The threats against Pip escalate as she gets closer to the truth, and the danger eventually becomes much more personal. Pip’s investigation stops being a school project pretty quickly, but her determination to finish what she started never really changes.

The ending of the season brings together several of the threads that Pip has been chasing, including the truth about Sal, Elliot Ward, Andie, and Becca. I will not get into the full details here because the mystery is the reason to watch, but I will say that the final episodes give you plenty to process. The story does not simply reveal one person who did everything and tie a neat bow around the case. Multiple people contributed to the circumstances surrounding Andie’s death, and the truth is considerably messier than the original murder-suicide narrative that the town accepted.

As an adaptation of Holly Jackson’s book, I think the series does a good job of capturing the general tone and momentum of the story. It has the teenage investigation, the small-town secrets, the growing danger, and the relationship between Pip and Ravi without making the romance completely overshadow the mystery. If you have already read the book, you will have an advantage when it comes to some of the twists, but I still think the series gives you enough to enjoy watching the story unfold.

I would not call A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder the most sophisticated murder mystery I have ever watched, and some of the decisions made by the characters require you to accept that these are teenagers making choices that most adults would immediately recognize as terrible ideas. But that is also part of the appeal. This is YA mystery television, and it knows what it is trying to be.

If you like small-town murder mysteries, teenage detectives, complicated secrets, and stories where the person everyone blamed from the beginning may not be guilty, I think this is an easy recommendation. The season is quick to get through, the mystery keeps moving, and Pip is an entertaining character to follow even when you want to yell at her to stop walking into suspicious buildings alone.

For me, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a fun mystery series that does exactly what I wanted it to do. It gives you a case to solve, plenty of suspects to question, enough twists to keep the investigation moving, and a satisfying payoff by the end of the season. Add in Pip and Ravi’s developing relationship, and you have a show that is easy to binge and even easier to recommend when someone wants a mystery that does not require a massive commitment.