A Good Girl's Guide to Murder in Order

Why this order?

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is a young-adult mystery trilogy by Holly Jackson, centered on Pippa "Pip" Fitz-Amobi, a sharp sixth-form student who turns a school capstone project into a real murder investigation in her quiet English town. Because the story is one continuous arc rather than three standalone cases, reading order matters: each book builds directly on the fallout of the last, so the simplest and best path is straight publication order.

Start with A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (2019), in which Pip reopens the closed case of a local girl's death. Then read Good Girl, Bad Blood (2020), where a new disappearance pulls Pip back into amateur detective work, and finish with As Good as Dead (2021), the darker, consequence-heavy conclusion that resolves the trilogy's running threads. The mystery, the character relationships, and the emotional toll all carry across the three books, so skipping or reordering them spoils key reveals.

The one wrinkle is Kill Joy, a prequel novella that Jackson wrote for World Book Day and published in February 2021 — a few months before As Good as Dead. It dramatizes the murder-mystery party that first sparked Pip's obsession with true crime. You can read it first as an origin-story warm-up, or save it for after the trilogy as a nostalgic look back at where Pip began. It is short and skippable for the core plot, but rewarding for fans of the character.

If you enjoy this brand of smart, investigation-driven YA, Karen M. McManus (the One of Us Is Lying series) is the closest read-alike. The trilogy was also adapted into a television series, but the books remain the definitive way to experience Pip's full story.