As Good As Dead

What's inside (7 sections)

1. Who will look for you
2. The Duct Tape Killer on paper
3. Taken to the warehouse
4. How to bury a body and frame a rapist
5. What the ending costs
6. Key takeaways
7. FAQ

I did not expect to feel nervous opening the third book. I had liked Pippa Fitz-Amobi a lot in the first two, and I wanted her to get a quiet ending. As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson, published 2021 by Delacorte Press, 544 pages, ISBN 9781984896408, third in A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, does not give her that. I read it slow, then all at once at the end, and I had to sit with what Pip does for a day before I could talk about it with anyone.

If you have not read the first two, here is the short version. In book one Pip solved the Andie Bell murder for a school project and learned how badly Little Kilton and Fairview wanted that case closed. In book two, Good Girl, Bad Blood, she tried to quit and then started a true crime podcast to find Jamie Reynolds, Connor's older brother who went missing. That search pulled in the Child Brunswick threads, the man who called himself Charlie Green, and the journalist Stanley Forbes, and it ended with Pip held and threatened and Stanley dead. She lived, but she did not walk away clean. That is where this book starts. Not with a new mystery, but with the after effects.

Pip is eighteen now and waiting on Cambridge. She has panic attacks that come out of nowhere. Loud hallways. A car door slamming. A certain smell in the woods. She dreams about being tied and about blood and wakes up choking. She tells her parents she is fine. She tells Ravi she is fine. She is not fine.

She buys Xanax from a local dealer and lies about it to everyone. She keeps two burner phones in her desk drawer and tells herself she will stop after one more week. Pip counts pills. She hides the foil. When Ravi asks why she seems distant, she blames college stress.

The podcast made her known. Strangers recognize her at the cafe where Cara works. Some are kind. Many are cruel. Her inbox fills with death threats, and she has learned to skim them. One keeps repeating, though. Who will look for you when you are the one who disappears. Same wording, different accounts, for months. At first she files it with the rest.

Then real life starts copying the inbox.

Who will look for you

It starts small enough that Pip almost misses it. A dead pigeon on the lawn as she leaves for a mediation meeting in New York City. Then headless stick figures drawn in chalk on her driveway. Rain washes the first set away, so she tells herself it was neighbor kids. Then a second set appears, five figures this time, closer to the house, and another dead pigeon in the exact same spot as the first. This one has no head.

The mediation matters, so let me pause there. Max Hastings is suing Pip for libel over her podcast. Max is the rich kid Pip named as a rapist in book two, the one who drugged and assaulted Becca Bell and others. He offers to drop the suit if she posts an apology and says the audio clip was doctored. Pip refuses. The scene sets the money gap that hangs over the whole book.

Back home, the stalking gets louder. On her running route she finds chalk writing that says Dead Girl Walking. Ravi says go to the police, so she does. Detective Hawkins listens and says there is no real evidence. No break in. No clear photo. No name. Pip leaves angry, and I was angry with her, because Hawkins follows procedure and still fails her.

The phone calls start after that. Breathing, then click. Then her printer turns itself on at night and spits out a single sheet with that same line about disappearing. Pip checks windows and finds nothing forced. She starts sleeping with her running shoes by the bed.

She and Ravi run into Ant and Lauren on a walk and the talk turns sharp. Pip asks Ant point blank if he sent the messages. He looks genuinely confused. So not him. When they get back to Pip's house there are three chalk figures almost touching the front step. Each set moves closer. Whoever it is can stand in her yard at night without being seen.

Pip does what Pip always does. She starts a file.

The Duct Tape Killer on paper

Her search for chalk figures and dead birds pulls up an old Connecticut case. Six years ago, in a town near Little Kilton, four women were strangled. The killer wrapped their entire heads in duct tape before killing them, which is why papers called him the DT Killer, short for Duct Tape Killer. One victim had found dead birds outside her home before she died. Another had seen chalk drawings. Pip reads that and goes cold.

The case is supposed to be closed. A man named Billy Karras confessed and has been in prison ever since. He worked for Green Scene Ltd., a lawn care company owned by Jason Bell, who is Andie and Becca Bell's father. That link snags Pip because Jason has been in her life since book one, the grieving dad turned angry man who shoved Max at the cafe. Pip remembers Andie contacting a victim's family before she died, which never made sense at the time.

Pip finds a Facebook page run by Billy's mother, Maria Karras, who says her son is innocent and that the confession was forced. Maria says she emailed Pip's podcast address before and got no reply. Maria lays out why the evidence was thin. Billy was on job sites near two victims because Green Scene sent him there. His fingerprints were on lawn equipment, not in homes. The confession came after hours without a lawyer, with details that shifted. Pip reads the interview transcript herself and agrees it reads coerced.

Pip also meets Harriet Hunter, sister of one of the DT victims. Harriet tells Pip that Andie Bell reached out to her not long before Andie was killed. Andie used a secret email address Pip never knew about. Pip guesses the password, gets in, and finds an unsent draft where Andie says she knows who the DT Killer is, someone who spent time in her home. No name.

Other links stack. Jason Bell owned the trucks, the schedules, the warehouse out by the woods. Jason had access to homes through quotes and lawn jobs. Pip goes to the Bell house to ask Jason about Billy and he slams the door and tells her never to come back. On her run home a white car tries to run her down and speeds off with no plate she can catch. She tells Hawkins. Hawkins notes it and does nothing.

I liked this middle stretch for the paperwork. Receipts, shift rosters, phone logs, podcast emails with timestamps. Jackson plays fair. You see what Pip sees. My only complaint here is that Pip's hacking is too smooth. She gets into accounts fast and finds deleted posts in minutes. As a teen who lives online it is plausible once or twice. By the fourth time it felt like a shortcut.

Taken to the warehouse

Pip knows she should stop going on runs alone. She goes anyway because running is the one place her head quiets. She is tracking an unknown call with an identifier app when she hears a phone ringing behind her on the trail. Then hands grab her from behind and she is shoved into a car trunk.

She wakes at the remote Green Scene warehouse, a metal building out past the tree line with mowers and shelving units bolted to the wall. Jason Bell stands over her. He ties her to the shelving and wraps duct tape around her lower face and head, the way the papers described. He talks while he works. He killed those women because they were loud and did not listen. He says Billy was convenient, young and scared and easy to press. He says Andie figured it out and he could not risk her talking. He says Pip kept pulling threads and leaving her address everywhere through the podcast, so finding her was simple.

Then he leaves to get something from his truck, confident the tape and rope will hold.

What happens next is fast and messy. Pip works her wrists raw against a shelf edge until one hand slips. She gets the tape loose enough to breathe and scream, though no one hears. She shoves off the shelving and runs for the tree line. She hears his truck return. She grabs a hammer left on a workbench near the door. When he comes in after her, she swings. She does not stop at one hit. She hits until he is on the floor and not moving and the handle is slick.

Jackson writes this without making Pip heroic. Pip vomits. She shakes so hard she drops the hammer twice. She knows this was not clean self defense in legal terms, because he was not actively touching her when she swung again and again. She was free enough to run and she chose to turn and fight.

She calls Ravi.

That call is the turn from mystery into something darker. Ravi comes without asking twice. He holds her while she cries and then he listens while she says she cannot go to the police. Ravi does not give a speech. He says they are a team. Team Pip and Ravi.

How to bury a body and frame a rapist

I want to be clear about what they do, because the book is clear and you should decide for yourself how you feel. They do not call an ambulance. They do not call Hawkins.

They cool Jason's body in the car with the air conditioning blasting to confuse time of death. They build alibis with friends who do not know the full truth, movie night texts, shared location pins, Cara covering a gap without asking too much. They go back to the warehouse and clean. They set a fire at the warehouse to kill what they missed. Then they decide to pin Jason's killing on Max Hastings.

The logic, as Pip lays it out to Ravi in whispers, is this. Jason ruined lives and got away with it. Max raped Becca and others and walked because a jury did not believe girls who drank and texted after. Max's trial for sexual assault ends in acquittals while Pip watches from the gallery, sick. Billy lost six years, Andie is dead, Sal is dead. One man is dead by her hand. One is free and still a danger. If Max goes down for murder, he cannot hurt more women, and Pip might stay free.

So they drug Max with Rohypnol, steal his shoes and a jacket and a few hairs, warm Jason's body back up, plant Max's traces on Jason and Jason's blood on Max's things, stage the scene to read as Max killing Jason in a fight about Andie and Becca, cause an explosion to explain the mess, then return everything to Max's house like they were never there. It is tense and detailed and, for me, too long. I started skimming the cleaning checklist.

The police bite. Hawkins brings Pip in because her white headphones were found at Jason's house. She had lost them when she visited to question him days before the kidnapping. She cannot admit she was ever there, so she lies badly. Hawkins watches her lie and lets her go. At home she tells Ravi she wants to confess. She meets him on the street and he tells her he just lied to Hawkins for her, that he said he lost her headphones when he went to the Bells about a fundraiser. Pip cries and does not confess that day.

Then sirens at the Hastings house. Max is arrested for Jason Bell's murder. He sees Pip at the station later, shoves her into a brick wall, screams that she set him up while officers pull him off. Pip gives Hawkins a folder with proof that Jason was the DT Killer, old work logs, the Andie draft, Harriet's statement, Maria's timeline. Hawkins takes it. Pip reads his face as understanding what she did and choosing to let Max take the fall.

Billy Karras walks free after six years. That scene, Maria crying outside the prison while cameras roll, is the one clean good thing Pip does here, and even it is built on a lie.

What the ending costs

Pip breaks up with Ravi to protect him. She tells him they can only be together if Max stays convicted and she never gets charged, which is another way of saying she cannot ask him to wait while she might go to prison. They are both wrecked. She pulls away from Cara and her parents and Connor, stops answering group chats, finishes school on fumes. She goes to Cambridge and does not contact Ravi for over a year. She lives like someone awaiting a knock, because she is.

Over a year later, Max Hastings is convicted of Jason Bell's murder. Not the rapes. The murder he did not commit. The book ends with a short text from Ravi to Pip. Hey, Sarge, remember me. Pip stares at it and smiles through tears, and Jackson stops there without promising reunion.

What stayed with me is how much this book hates the idea that truth always saves. Pip tells the truth in book one and the town punishes her. She tells the truth in book two and the trial still fails. Here she lies and frees an innocent man and jails a guilty one, and the cost is her own sense of self. The system failed Becca and Billy. Pip also committed murder and framed someone. Those facts do not cancel.

I have real criticisms, even though I could not stop reading.

The pacing sags in the cover up. The stalking half moves fast, short chapters, chalk and birds and calls. The second half becomes instructions. Cool the body. Heat the body. Wipe this. Text this person. I understand Jackson wants you to feel how exhausting lying is, but I started counting pages instead of feeling scared.

Pip's competence also wobbles. She cannot face a hallway without panicking, shaking hands, tunnel vision, counting breaths, but she can plant forensic traces while sobbing. Both can be true in shock, but the book does not pause long enough to sell the shift. Her Xanax use opens as a serious thread with dealer texts and hidden phones, then fades once the warehouse happens. I wanted one more scene where she asks for help plainly.

The ethics are meant to disturb, and they did, but I worry the book lets Pip off too clean with Hawkins. He spots her lie about the headphones, takes her DT folder without questions, yet never pushes the murder. I read him as tired and quietly complicit, choosing a useful conviction over a true one. After three books of officers missing evidence, it feels earned, but also convenient. If Hawkins had pressed harder, Pip might have faced court for real, and the book backs away from that courtroom.

And Max is a monster, clearly. Jackson documents what he did to Becca and others, with statements and texts that make his acquittal infuriating. Still, framing him for a killing he did not do left me uneasy in a way the book wants but does not fully explore. Pip decides who deserves prison. I cheered when Billy walked, then felt sick when I remembered Max's cell is built on planted hairs. I just wanted Pip to sit with it longer instead of running to Cambridge.

What Jackson does well is Pip and Ravi. Their love is not grand speeches. It is drives and shared chargers and Ravi editing audio late while Pip maps timelines on her floor. It is Ravi asking her to stop and Pip going anyway. It is Ravi lying about the headphones even though his brother Sal was destroyed by a lie. When Pip ends things to shield him, it hurts because they have been kind in small, consistent ways for three books. The final text lands because Jackson resisted a big reunion scene. Just a nickname, Sarge, and a door left open.

Little Kilton feels full circle here. Cara covering for Pip without knowing the full ask. Connor quieter after Jamie. Pip's parents trying to set rules they cannot enforce. The town that filmed Pip now watches Max's arrest from lawns.

Should you read it. If you stayed through the podcast season and the Child Brunswick fallout and want to know what happens to Max and Jason and Billy, yes. Go in knowing this is the darkest of the three, with strangling details, duct tape, abduction, drug use, assault testimony in court, and a killing by hammer that is described without looking away. It is about a girl who learned to investigate to help people and then used those skills to hide what she did.

I closed it missing the Pip from book one who color coded her murder board and brought Ravi biscuits. That Pip is gone. What is left is someone who got Billy home, put Max away, lost a year with Ravi, and may still be charged one day if Hawkins changes his mind. I believed Pip would make those choices, and that belief kept me up past midnight to finish.

Facts held as printed: first published 2021 by Delacorte Press, 544 pages, ISBN 9781984896408, author Holly Jackson, series A Good Girl's Guide to Murder book three.

FAQ

Who is the DT Killer in As Good As Dead?

Jason Bell, Andie and Becca Bell's father and owner of Green Scene Ltd. He wrapped victims' heads in duct tape, while Billy Karras served six years for his crimes until Pip proved it.

Does Pip go to court for killing Jason Bell?

No. She and Ravi plant Max Hastings' traces on the scene and Max is arrested, then convicted of Jason's murder over a year later. Pip leaves for Cambridge still fearing Hawkins may charge her.

Is As Good As Dead the last book in the series?

Yes, it is book three in A Good Girl's Guide to Murder after the first book and Good Girl, Bad Blood. It ends with Pip at Cambridge and a short text from Ravi, with no promise of reunion.