A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is a British mysterythriller television series based on the 2019 novel by Holly Jackson, adapted by Poppy Cogan, directed by Dolly Wells, and developed by Moonage Pictures and the German public broadcaster ZDFneo for BBC Three. The series, consisting of six episodes, covers events from the first book, and it was released for streaming on 1 July 2024 on BBC iPlayer in the United Kingdom, followed by its terrestrial premiere on BBC Three on 10 July. It was released internationally on Netflix on 1 August 2024.
In November 2024, it was renewed for a second series.
Premise
Pip Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myers) is not satisfied that the killing of a local schoolgirl has been investigated sufficiently and takes matters into her own hands, producing her EPQ on the topic.[2]
Pippa 'Pip' Fitz-Amobi is entering her final year of school and hopes to go to university, and for the subject of her EPQ she decides to investigate the local 2019 disappearance of Andie Bell from five years earlier. A popular pupil, Andie was dating classmate Sal Singh when she disappeared, with police suspecting him of being responsible for her murder. Before he could be charged Sal allegedly confessed to killing Andie and then took his own life. However Pip believes that Sal was innocent and is determined to find out the truth. After initially being rebuffed by Sal's brother Ravi, she begins her investigation by interviewing Sal's friend Naomi Ward, the older sister of Pip's best friend Cara, whose father Elliot is an English teacher at their school. Naomi reveals that Sal had an alibi for the night of Andie's disappearance, though doesn't elaborate after their conversation is interrupted. Following an interview with Sal's friend Max Hastings, who claims Naomi is lying to protect Sal, she approaches Ravi again. After she tells him that she believes Sal is innocent, Ravi shows Pip Sal's phone, indicating that someone else appears to have sent the confession text from his phone due to the difference in grammar.
2
"Episode 2"
Dolly Wells
Poppy Cogan
1July2024(2024-07-01)
Now working with Ravi, Pip turns her attention to Andie's two best friends, Emma Hutton and Chloe Burch. Interviewing them, she finds out that Andie had a secret, second, older boyfriend. Taking a break from the investigation, Pip goes camping with her friends. During the trip she finds an anonymous warning left in her bed telling her to stop digging. Returning from the camping trip, Pip and Ravi deduce from Andie's social media photos that shortly before her disappearance, she and Nat had had a falling out, which they presume was related to nude photos of Nat having been leaked and suspect that Andie may have been responsible. Pip and Ravi confront Nat who denies hurting Andie and discloses that Andie was involved with Max. Pip goes back to interview Max, finding an intimate photo of Andie in his room, however he claims that he found it at school, that his relationship with Andie was not romantic, and that in fact Andie dealt drugs and he was one of her customers.
3
"Episode 3"
Dolly Wells
Ruby Thomas
1July2024(2024-07-01)
Pip decides that she must track down the drug dealer Andie was dealing for. To do so she must find the location of a Calamity party, an infamous secret teen party supposedly full of drugs and sex. Later, attending the party with her friends Cara and Lauren, she manages to find the drug dealer, who reveals that Andie kept a secret burner phone along with a drug stash in a stuffed rabbit. Afterwards Pip narrowly escapes an unwanted sexual encounter with another partygoer whom she'd misled during her undercover ruse. Back at home she receives a threatening text message that tells her to stop investigating. The next day an impromptu conversation with Andie's sister, Becca Bell, discourages her from continuing her investigation, but then deciding that she needs to find the rabbit and phone, Pip breaks into Andie and Becca's house with Ravi, where they are almost caught by Becca and Nat's brother, policeman Dan Da Silva.
Going through the stuffed rabbit that they stole from Andie's house, Pip and Ravi find a list of Andie's customers written out in code. Later that day, Pip also discovers that the customer list was written on a piece of paper from the Ivy House Hotel. Going to investigate, Pip steals the guest list from 2019 and during their escape, they discover that Andie stayed at the hotel when Pip recognises the floor from a selfie Andie took there. Pip determines that Andie stayed with her older boyfriend under the pseudonyms of Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby. Pip attempts to call the number associated with the booking but find that it is disconnected. The next day, on her way to school, Dan corners Pip, revealing that he knows it was her that broke into the Bell house and pressuring her to stop investigating — even going so far as to show her a video of Sal getting aggressive during a police interview. Unsure of the meaning of the video, Pip wonders if Sal did commit the murder. She remembers seeing Sal and Andie the day before Andie disappeared, with Sal asking Pip if she had seen Andie, when Andie wanted to be left alone. After an argument with Ravi, Pip returns to Cara's house, where Naomi gives Pip access to her laptop before leaving for the 2019 class reunion. On the laptop, Pip finds screenshots from Max Hastings's Instagram account proving Sal's alibi: he had, in fact, been with his friends until after midnight on the night of Andie's disappearance. Pip then goes to find Naomi to ask her why she, Max, and Jake Lawrence had lied to the police saying that Sal left their hangout to go find Andie at 10:30 that night.
5
"Episode 5"
Tom Vaughan
Poppy Cogan and Ajoke Ibironke
1July2024(2024-07-01)
At the 2019 class reunion party, Naomi reveals to Pip that she, Max, and Jake were involved in a drunk driving collision on New Year's Day 2019. Max, the driver, had called someone to have it covered up. Naomi further reveals that someone had blackmailed the three of them into lying to the police in order to implicate Sal. Later that night, Pip receives further threatening text messages. Attempting to goad the killer, she makes a video claiming that she has proof Sal is innocent. However, the next day, during a family birthday party, Pip's dog Barney is killed. Distraught, Pip realises that Max must have called Dan after the accident. When Pip confronts Dan at the police station, he admits that he committed statutory rape against a 15-year-old Andie, two years before her death, and that Max was blackmailing him. The next day at school, Pip gets a call from Andie's secret older boyfriend's number. When Pip answers, it turns out to be Naomi using her father Elliot's old phone. After getting picked up by Elliot for a movie night with Cara, Pip deliberately leaves her phone in the car so she can track it with her laptop. She then discovers that Elliot printed the message telling her to stop digging, and sees that Elliot has gone to the old Ward family home, which they moved out of years earlier. After notifying Ravi where she is going, she goes to the house and confronts Elliot. He confesses that he had an inappropriate romantic relationship with Andie, which ended when she started dating Sal. Elliot further reveals that months later, Andie approached him and tried to blackmail him for money. Refusing to pay her, they fought, and Andie fell and hit her head on the counter. He then went to call an ambulance, but when he came back, she was gone. After finishing his story, Pip hears a tapping coming from the pipes. Assuming it is Andie, Pip races up to the attic to discover a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Andie. Elliot closes the door to the attic, trapping Pip inside.
6
"Episode 6"
Tom Vaughan
Poppy Cogan
1July2024(2024-07-01)
The young woman in the attic, Isla, tells Pip she had been homeless when Elliot offered to let her stay at the house. That evening, he confessed to her that he murdered Sal to prevent the police from investigating him for Andie's disappearance. Elliot lured Sal into the woods, then drugged and killed him before sending the false confession using Sal's phone. He then kept Isla trapped in the house for the next five years. The police arrest Elliot, though he still denies having killed Andie. Realising that Elliot could not have been the one who abducted Barney, Pip confronts him at the police station, and he reveals that he blackmailed Naomi and her friends, having learned about the hit-and-run from reading Naomi's diary. Elliot also shares that he believes Andie wanted money because she wanted to run away from her abusive father, Jason. Pip learns from Jesse, an employee at Jason's recycling plant, that Andie's sister Becca was once drugged with Rohypnol and raped at a Calamity party; Pip deduces that Max used the Rohypnol he bought from Andie to sexually assault Becca. Becca tells Pip that Andie dissuaded her from reporting the assault to the police because it would implicate Andie as Max's drug dealer. Upon learning that Andie had been planning to run away from home, Becca, feeling abandoned, pushed Andie, who was already injured from her struggle with Elliot, and killed her. Becca takes Pip to where she hid Andie's body in a septic tank, before revealing that she drugged Pip's tea with Rohypnol and intends to kill her too, but Ravi and Cara arrive just in time, and the police apprehend Becca. A flashback reveals that, on the day Andie went missing, Sal had been looking for her so that he could support her plans to run away from home. Pip and Ravi ultimately confess their feelings for each other.
Production
In September 2022, the project was announced as a BBC Three television adaptation of the Holly Jackson novel A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, produced by Moonage Pictures.[3]Dolly Wells is a director on the project from a script by Poppy Cogan, alongside Zia Ahmed, Ajoke Ibironke and Ruby Thomas. It is produced by Florence Walker, and executive producers include Matthew Read, Matthew Bouch and Frith Tiplady for Moonage Pictures, and Lucy Richer and Danielle Scott-Haughton for the BBC, along with Wells, Holly Jackson and Cogan.[4]
Despite the executive producer Frith Tiplady stressing that the first series has a real end,[5][6] it was renewed for a second series on 20 November 2024, which will cover events from the second book, Good Girl, Bad Blood. Jackson and Cogan will be returning for the screenplay, while Myers and Iqbal are set to reprise their roles.[7]
Casting
In June 2023, production started with Emma Myers and Zain Iqbal cast into the lead roles of Pip and Ravi.[8][9]
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder was released for streaming on 1 July 2024 on BBC iPlayer in the United Kingdom[14][16] and in Ireland,[17]Stan in Australia,[18] and ThreeNow in New Zealand.[19] A terrestrial broadcast on BBC Three began on 10 July 2024,[16] with two episodes being broadcast per week.[20] The series was released in Germany on 30 August 2024 on the ZDFmediathek service, while ZDFneo will broadcast two episodes per week beginning from 8 September 2024.[21] On 22 April 2024, Netflix announced that the series would be released on its platform on 1 August 2024.[22]
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 82% of 39 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.3/10.The website's consensus reads: "A frothy series that carries off the classic murder mystery with a light touch, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder's checks all the boxes for a sweetly satisfying binge."[23]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 69 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[24]
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