Book Review - As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson

Title: As Good As Dead
Series: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (# 3)
Author: Holly Jackson
 
Description: Pip is about to head to college, but she is still haunted by the way her last investigation ended. She’s used to online death threats in the wake of her viral true-crime podcast, but she can’t help noticing an anonymous person who keeps asking her: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?

Soon the threats escalate and Pip realizes that someone is following her in real life. When she starts to find connections between her stalker and a local serial killer caught six years ago, she wonders if maybe the wrong man is behind bars.

Police refuse to act, so Pip has only one choice: find the suspect herself—or be the next victim. As the deadly game plays out, Pip discovers that everything in her small town is coming full circle... and if she doesn’t find the answers, this time she will be the one who disappears...
 
Review: “As Good As Dead” is the third and final book in the “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” series by Holly Jackson. So far, I have loved this series. I was really excited to finally read this last one. And it did not disappoint.
 
Pip Fitz-Amobi is used to online threats by now, but there is one that she can’t let go: who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? And the threats are not just online, Pip has a stalker, but of course the police doesn’t take it seriously. So Pip does what Pip does best: she is investigating herself. As she seems to be solving cases more often then the police do. She finds a link between the stalker and a local serial killer, who is behind bars. And Pip suspects that again, the wrong person is being accused of the crime.
 
It's a Young Adult series, very popular, but also very dark. And this is the darkest one yet. It is again a whodunit, but there is a big twist at the halfway point of the book that really blew my mind and turned it upside down. It takes a completely different path, but in this case it was surprisingly good and does not follow the same path as many whodunit’s do. This is the least popular book of the three, and I think that dark twist is the reason for many. If I would have to rank the books, this would also be my number three, but mostly because I missed the mixed media element. It’s still present, don’t get me wrong, but less then the other two. That’s the only reason I didn’t give it a perfect score.
 
The book again deals with themes like friendship, justice, murder, social media, crime. But again, Jackson made everything a lot darker this time. It sometimes doesn’t even feel like a YA novel anymore. But I liked that about this book, while I can understand that fans of the series might see this as a downside. For me it felt like a logical step, because you want to avoid repetition.
 
As for that midway twist, it left me staring at the pages for a moment. I did not expect that at all, but I absolutely loved it. This book eventually plays with morals, what’s the right thing to do, did the character do the right thing? Most choices are controversial, but make this book so much better.
 
“As Good As Dead” is also the biggest book in the series, but you don’t feel it for a second. You just fly through it, it’s an intense ride of emotions. I think Holly Jackson wrote a fantastic trilogy. I’m not a series reader, but I haven’t been this invested in a book series since “The Hunger Games”. Well done Holly Jackson!
 
Rating: 4, 5/ 5