Scan barcode
A review by reneedecoskey
As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
2.0
This finale made me want to stab things, so it was a good one to listen to on audio as I was knitting. As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson is the final book in the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder trilogy. You can’t read this as a stand-alone; you need to read the first two in order for it to make sense.
This was my least favorite of the three. I loved the first one. I enjoyed the second one. I liked this one for the first half, and then, without giving anything major away, something really big and out of character happens for our protagonist, Pippa, and I probably appear on traffic cameras in the tri-county area, gesturing wildly in my car and yelling at the narrator that it makes NO SENSE. It didn’t fit with Pip’s character and the PTSD she was experiencing from an event in the second book. And it just got worse from there.
I hated Pip and her whole navel-gazing, “poor me; I did a bad thing and now I’m going to once again forego a rational response in favor of being a hero because I love my friends” bit. And when the more rational people in her life are like “stop being like this,” she sobs and comes up with reasons why she can’t do the thing that makes the most sense because ONE cop never believes her. And he’s a detective. She wouldn’t even be talking to him first (the author is British — more on that in a second — and may not understand how the American police system works. Although I have no idea if detectives are even the first line of contact in the UK so… ).
The series takes place in Connecticut, but like I said, the author is British. I’m not sure why she chose CT, but there are chiefly British names (Pippa, for example) and expressions (“I’ll come round to yours”) throughout. Not sure why the author/editor didn’t look into that a little more. It didn’t bother me until I became annoyed with everything in the last 5 hours of this book (it’s long).
If you read the series, you have to read this one to finish it and get a resolution and see how it all, weirdly, ties together. And maybe you will disagree with me that the events in this one make no sense. I hope you do because I’d love to discuss it. If this were a stand-alone I wouldn’t recommend it, but as a series finale, I think I have to. But for me… 2/5 stars.
This was my least favorite of the three. I loved the first one. I enjoyed the second one. I liked this one for the first half, and then, without giving anything major away, something really big and out of character happens for our protagonist, Pippa, and I probably appear on traffic cameras in the tri-county area, gesturing wildly in my car and yelling at the narrator that it makes NO SENSE. It didn’t fit with Pip’s character and the PTSD she was experiencing from an event in the second book. And it just got worse from there.
I hated Pip and her whole navel-gazing, “poor me; I did a bad thing and now I’m going to once again forego a rational response in favor of being a hero because I love my friends” bit. And when the more rational people in her life are like “stop being like this,” she sobs and comes up with reasons why she can’t do the thing that makes the most sense because ONE cop never believes her. And he’s a detective. She wouldn’t even be talking to him first (the author is British — more on that in a second — and may not understand how the American police system works. Although I have no idea if detectives are even the first line of contact in the UK so… ).
The series takes place in Connecticut, but like I said, the author is British. I’m not sure why she chose CT, but there are chiefly British names (Pippa, for example) and expressions (“I’ll come round to yours”) throughout. Not sure why the author/editor didn’t look into that a little more. It didn’t bother me until I became annoyed with everything in the last 5 hours of this book (it’s long).
If you read the series, you have to read this one to finish it and get a resolution and see how it all, weirdly, ties together. And maybe you will disagree with me that the events in this one make no sense. I hope you do because I’d love to discuss it. If this were a stand-alone I wouldn’t recommend it, but as a series finale, I think I have to. But for me… 2/5 stars.