5 Highlights From Netflix’s ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ Adaption

Warning: This article contains references to murder, suicide, sexual assault, and violent death of a pet as well as spoilers.

This past weekend, the Netflix adaption of YA book A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson dropped for streaming. Starring Emma Myers (Enid from Wednesday) as the titular heroine, the story covers seventeen-year-old Pip’s investigation into a local tragedy from five years ago in which a local teen girl was believed to be murdered by her boyfriend who killed himself a few days later after texting a confession to the crime. Andie Bell’s remains were never recovered, and after a few encounters with her boyfriend Sal Singh just before the tragedy, Pip believes that Sal might be innocent of the crime and becomes determined to uncover the truth. With all six episodes watched, here are the key moments from the series.

1) Pip Pitz-Amobi works well as a flawed but driven character. Pip is smart, clever, and driven, and she firmly believes that the truth of what happened is important. She also struggles with being so fixated on her quest that she’s not always the most reliable friend and can be a bit impulsive in her choices to the risk of her own life as well as the feelings of others. When Pip first approaches Sal’s brother Ravi, she’s so fixated on the truth she doesn’t consider how her actions might traumatize Sal’s family, let alone Andie’s family and friends. She gets a lot of pushback at first, which is a firm reminder to true crime fans that what feels like entertainment is also a series of deeply painful events to people who may not want to be forced to relive them. 

Pip also has several moments taking off without back-up or ignoring threats to stop investigating. We want the truth as much as she does, but she ends up with consequences or just skirting consequences several times. Her dog is fatally harmed as part of things, and her choices during a calamity party (think local rave) and in breaking into places for clues as well as confronting suspected killers just barely manage to keep her from becoming another victim herself. However, one of her most agonizing moments is when she tries to avoid getting her best friend’s sister named in a hit-and-run that may have connections to Andie Bell only to end up discovering and revealing that her friend’s father was a monster partly guilty for what happened to Andie and Sal.

2) Andie Bell gets more and more complicated. In the murder story genre, the more perfect a victim seems on the outside, the more messy you know the truth is going to be. Andie Bell was beautiful and beloved. She was from a nice, well-to-do family with a solid friend group and a doting boyfriend. It’s not long before Pip realizes how much was happening behind closed doors. Andie was involved with an “older guy” at one point and it looks like she might have been unfaithful to her boyfriend, but that’s also not quite true. Andie had a rough home life with an abusive father. She had been involved with some older men including one she lied about her age to (who later became a cop) and another who was a teacher (and the father of Pip’s best friend) who absolutely knew what he was doing was wrong. Andie was selling drugs to get the money to escape her life and did want to build that life with Sal, whom she was loyal to. She had also spread the nudes of a classmate and sold the date rape drugs to another teen who ended up using them on her sister. 

Things spiral out of control just when Andie thought she was about to get out, but her father finds and takes her money stash. Andie tries to blackmail the teacher she was involved with to recover the money. When that blows up she’s injured in their fight and goes home only to get into a confrontation with her sister who wanted to report being raped to the police. Andie doesn’t want to get named as the supplier of the date rape drugs and explains to her sister about her plan to escape which leads to a second confrontation where she’s killed. 

3) Becca Bell, the equally complicated killer. Becca Bell has her moments of sympathy. It didn’t seem like she intended to kill Andie, but her desperation and rage after having been raped, finding out her sister was her rapist’s roofie dealer, and then discovering her sister was leaving her alone to deal with their abusive father was a sudden and intense culmination of anger, despair, and grief. Her fears that kids like Max Hastings, her rapist, get away with everything were honestly far too real. We hate that she killed Pippa’s dog and tried to kill Pippa, but we also feel a lot of sympathy for her rage.  

4) Characters we wanted to see get consequences. We hate Daniel de Silva, the slimy cop who had the fling with Andie when she was underage and is being blackmailed to help Max Hastings hide a hit-and-run, but we really hate Max Hastings, the rapist, hit-and-run killer, and blackmailer that we wish had been guilty because we wanted to see him get punished. While those two were guilty of terrible things, neither murdered Andie or Sal. Neither seemed to get consequences for what they did either. We did see teacher Mr. Ward go down for killing Sal and framing it as a suicide so that the police wouldn’t uncover the fact he slept with Andie. Then he kept a teen who looked like Andie prisoner in the attic of his second property after he confessed what he did to her. One of the best moments of the series might be when Pip confronts an arrested Mr. Ward and shuts down his inner monster in everyone’s speech by telling him she expected better from an English teacher. We saw a guilty party go down, but it also meant his daughters, one of which was Andie’s best friend, were going to have their lives ruined in the same way Sal’s family was. 

5) Ravi and Pip. It didn’t take long at all for fans to realize that Pip and Ravi had a thing for each other. Pip is the first person Ravi seems to be able to connect with when everyone thought Sal was guilty. Ravi is also the one who keeps her crazier impulses either in check or at least is around as backup, and Pip’s most reckless choices are always when no one is there to call her out on her single-minded and reckless focus. I was so mad when he almost left town, but it was also so understanding how he wanted a clean slate. His save-the-day reunion with Pip was absolutely perfect though.