SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the entirety of A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder.
The image of the red threads that stitch together the title of A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder on Holly Jackson’s U.S. book cover hints at the complicated ending of the story, which has been adapted into a television series by the BBC.
The six episodes, which launched on Netflix August 1, follows titular “good girl” Pippa Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myers) as she revisits the murder of Andie Bell (India Lillie Davies), which was pinned on Andie’s boyfriend at the time, Salil Singh (Rahul Pattni) who went by Sal. Shortly after Andie first went missing, Sal was said to have committed suicide, and the a text message confession to committing the murder from his phone made him culpable.
Determined to prove Sal innocent, Pip keeps digging into the loose threads left behind by police and investigators to find that Elliott Ward (Mathew Baynton), her English professor and childhood best friend’s father was responsible for inflicting the head injury that Andie sustained before her death. The second person directly involved in Andie’s death was her younger sister, Becca Bell (Carla Woodco*ck), who had an argument with Andie and pushed her to the floor where she choked on her own vomit and died because Becca didn’t move to help.
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“I suspected Elliot when I was reading it, but I did not suspect Becca at all. That took me by surprise,” Myers told Deadline. “I read the book ending first before I did the script, so I already knew by the time I got to the rest of the scripts. I was excited to see that play out. Especially with everybody bringing their characters to life like Matthew Baynton and Carla Woodco*ck. It was really fun to do the respective scenes interrogating them at the climax of the show.”
A third culprit of sorts turned out to be Max Hastings (Henry Ashton), a friend of Sal’s who gave Becca Bell Rohypnol — a date rape drug — and raped her. Becca told her sister about what happened to her, but Andie was the one who sold Max the drugs, and told her sister she couldn’t go with her to report it because that would mean she got in trouble. This was the source of the argument that led to Becca inadvertently killing Andie.
“[Max] starts the whole thing. He’s the cause of everything, honestly. And of course, he doesn’t take responsibility for anything. So Pip’s gonna be the one to put him in his place,” Myers added. “From the rest of the books. He definitely gets what he deserves, but if we get to continue on the rest of the show, I would love to just get that guy. Henry’s amazing. He’s so good at what he does. And so every scene we filmed together was so fun. And I genuinely can’t wait to film the rest of it.”
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A scene in the finale involving Pip’s confrontation of Max and looming threat to bring justice to all of the people he’s wronged sets up for more storyline down the road.
“Positioning Max as the series antagonist if we get to make all of it was very important to us as a hook into like, ‘Well, if there is a season two, this is the direction it’s going to go in,” author and executive producer Holly Jackson told Deadline. “And there are fun easter eggs that we’ve we’ve seeded in as well. Like there’s a horror story that our character Connor tells in the camping scene which book fans will, I think know the significance of.”
Jackson, who has a small cameo in Episode 4 of the show, initially planned the first book as a standalone because she wasn’t sure how well it would do.
“What we could do with the first season of the show, because we’re writing the TV show with all three books out and we know everything that happened, it means we get to do a lot more seeding off potential future stuff. Obviously not too much because we don’t know if we’re gonna get renewed and we had to fit a lot into six episodes anyway, but we did get to do some fun mentions of things that will happen later,” she said. “When I realized that I could do a whole trilogy, I went back and found the gaps and wrote back into them. I think I’ve done a good job because I see so many TikToks of people saying ‘Oh Holly Jackson planned this from the start and I actually didn’t.”
The author drew inspiration for the multi-layered ending to the murder mystery from the lack of nuance she found in books and TV shows.
“I was getting frustrated with [twists like], ‘Oh, it’s this guy and he does it just because he’s the bad guy or he’s a psychopath.’ I want more than that. I want something meaty. So when when I was planning and plotting A Good Girls Guide To Murder, I always knew that everything was going to be a lot more nuanced and morally gray,” she said. “That’s applies to Pip as well. We see Pip start the series and the show as someone who thinks that the truth is like the most important thing and that’s what motivates her. And she has like a belief in the justice system that like if she finds the truth, everything will turn out right in the end. She has a loss of innocence moment where she realizes that’s not quite how the real world works and the justice system doesn’t actually equate to justice or even the truth quite a lot of the time.”
“I wanted my killers to have, once you’ve had the full story and then motivation and everything, I wanted it to be a bit more confronting for the reader like, ‘Okay, put yourself in that exact situation and all these dominoes, could you see yourself committing a similar action if you were in that situation?'” Jackson added. “And I think that’s the case for both the answers to season one book one. Becca I’d say is more sympathetic, and Elliot Ward has obviously done some bad things, but I don’t think you could cut them open and say ‘This one is a bad person. It’s very much morally gray. And they’ve got their reasons for doing them which I mean feel like good intentions, but does that justify their actions? And it’s kind of a question that book series poses at large.”
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