48 pages • 1 hour read
Holly JacksonKill Joy
Fiction | Novella | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a crime thriller series for young adults written by British author Holly Jackson. The series contains three main novels, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Good Girl, Bad Blood, and As Good as Dead, and one prequel novella, Kill Joy. The series has also been adapted for Netflix with a premiere in the United States on August 1, 2024.
The first full installment in the series follows Pip as she re-investigates the murder of her former classmate, Andie Bell, who was murdered five years before. The entire town of Fairview, Connecticut, believes that Andie’s boyfriend, Sal Singh, is responsible for her death, but Sal took his truth with him to his grave since he apparently died by suicide a few days after the murder. The second and third novels in the series follow Pip after she has unraveled the many mysteries associated with Andie’s murder. Pip must learn to cope with not only the fallouts of these secrets but also the national attention she has garnered with her now-viral podcast, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
The series features recognizable technology usage, with Pip often using Instagram and text messages as tools in her investigations, and it pays homage to the popularity of the true crime genre. In an interview with the Branford Boase Award, Jackson states that her own love of true crime inspired her to write the series. The novels also use multimedia elements, such as the game instructions in Kill Joy, text messages, podcast transcripts, and social media posts.
Authorial Context: Holly Jackson
Holly Jackson is a British author known for her successful young adult crime thriller series, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, and two stand-alone novels, Five Survive and The Reappearance of Rachel Price. Jackson credits her love of the true crime genre as inspiration for her stories’ subject matter.
Although Jackson is British, she chooses to write novels set in America. Jackson admits that, in part, this was a marketing tactic, but her decision to write American-based stories also serves a narrative purpose. Jackson stated in an interview, “The US is a very fertile setting for messed-up things to happen that you might not necessarily buy if they happened in the UK. With some of those big true-crime stories it feels a bit like, ‘Only in America could this happen’” (Noble, Fiona. “Holly Jackson Discusses Success, TikTok and Her Latest YA Novel.” The Bookseller, 26 Jan. 2024). The American combination of having small towns within a large country, as well as ongoing conversations about gun usage in America, enables Jackson to craft realistic portrayals of American life and true crime.
Jackson shares her philosophy for how she crafts successful thriller novels, which contain “big, exciting, climactic parts but also smaller, creepy, everyday moments” (Noble). Both of these elements are in Jackson’s texts, which include big reveals and plot twists within seemingly ordinary settings. For example, in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Pip re-investigates the supposedly closed case of Andie Bell’s murder as the subject for her senior capstone project. Jackson presents the characters, their vernacular, and technology usage as familiar and mundane even as Pip and her friends experience events that are outside the scope of the everyday.
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