Good Girl, Bad Blood

Back in Little Kilton

Pip Fitz-Amobi promised herself — and her family — that she was finished with investigations after the events of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. She has her university application essays to write, her relationship with Ravi to nurture, and a community still processing what the Andie Bell case revealed about itself. She is done.

Then Jamie Reynolds disappears on the night of the town’s memorial event, and his younger brother Connor — Pip’s friend — is desperate. The police are treating it as a voluntary absence. Pip cannot ignore it. What begins as a favour to a friend becomes, once again, something that threatens everything she values — this time broadcast live to a growing audience of podcast listeners who want answers in real time.

The Podcast as Form and Ethics

The most significant structural addition in Good Girl, Bad Blood is the true crime podcast format. Pip begins recording her investigation, and the podcast transcripts — audience questions, listener theories, the growing pressure of public attention — become part of the novel’s mixed-media texture in the same way the case files did in the first book. Holly Jackson uses this addition not just as a format innovation but as an ethical interrogation: what does it mean to turn real people’s worst moments into content? What does an audience’s appetite for resolution do to the people who are living the story?

This is Jackson thinking seriously about the true crime genre she is working within — aware that the pleasure of following an investigation comes at a cost to the people the investigation involves, and willing to make that cost visible rather than papering over it.

Pip, Changed

One of Good Girl, Bad Blood’s most accomplished elements is its handling of what the first book’s events have done to Pip. She is not the same person. The confidence that drove her original investigation has been complicated by the knowledge of what it led to, and Jackson resists the temptation to let her protagonist remain comfortably heroic. Pip is compelling precisely because she is beginning to understand that her compulsion to investigate has costs she was not initially able to see.

The mystery itself is assembled with the same fair-play discipline Jackson demonstrated in the debut — clues planted, red herrings functional but not dishonest, resolution earned rather than manufactured. The second book in a YA series faces particular pressure to match the debut’s momentum while deepening the world; Good Girl, Bad Blood manages both.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A confident, thematically ambitious sequel that uses the true crime podcast format to interrogate the ethics of the genre Pip inhabits, while delivering another carefully constructed mystery.