The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Jackson, Holly. As Good As Dead. Penguin Random House, 2021. Kindle.

The novel is the last in the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder trilogy. The novel is narrated in third-person past by a narrator that sticks to the perspective of the protagonist, Pip, although some chapters incorporate epistolary documents at the end. The novel is broken up into two distinct parts and an epilogue. Part One contains Chapters 1-29. Part Two contains Chapters 30-55. In the first novel, Pip investigated the death of Andie Bell, which had been blamed on her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who had apparently killed himself and left a confession note. Pip discovered that Andie Bell had been dating her history teacher, Elliot Ward, in secret, and she was also secretly selling drugs. One night, she got into a fight with Elliot and got a concussion, then went home and got into a fight with her sister, who had been drugged and raped by Max Hastings, who had bought Rohypnol from Andie. Andie passed out and threw up, and Becca was so shocked she did not do anything to help. Terrified, she had buried her sister’s body and kept quiet. Elliot Ward, meanwhile, thought that he would get blamed for Andie’s disappearance, so he killed her boyfriend and dreamed him.

After all this came to light in Pip’s podcast, she wanted to get back to normal life in the second book in the series. But then her friend Jamie Reynolds went missing. She investigated his disappearance and discovered that Jamie had been caught between a decades-old chase between Charlie Green and Stanley Forbes. Stanley’s father was a serial killer who forced young Stanley to help him abduct children to brutally murder. Stanley had lured Charlie’s younger sister away, and Charlie had spent his entire life hunting down Stanley. Pip had tracked down Jamie and was inches away from solving the case, but then Charlie surprised her by showing up and shooting Stanley in front of her.

In Part One, Pip was dealing with the emotional trauma she underwent in the previous novel. Instead of focusing on therapy and healing, she started abusing Xanax purchased from a drug-dealer. She felt like she could only heal if she solved a new case that did not have any ambiguity. While looking for an appropriate case, though, Pip started receiving disturbing messages from a stalker. She tried to go to the police, but they did not believe her. Her boyfriend, Ravi, did believe her, and he helped her investigate the stalker. Soon, they realized that her stalker was the DT Killer, a serial-killer who has supposedly already been caught and arrested. But as Pip looks into the case, she realizes that the accused killer was coerced into a confession. She and Ravi tracked down leads and came to believe that the DT Killer was Daniel Da Silva. Pip went over to talk to his sister, Nat Da Silva, but she was abducted by the DT Killer himself (Jason Bell) at the end of Chapter 24.

At this point in the novel, the investigative mystery turns into a tale of abduction and escape that lasts for the next five chapters. At the end of Chapter 29, Pip killed Jason Bell. Part Two transitions into a new genre: The cover-up. Up until the end of Chapter 43, Pip and Ravi worked to stage the crime scene, manipulate the time of death, and establish rock-solid alibis for themselves at the new, falsified time of death. They pinned the murder on Max Hastings, who had gotten away with a series of rapes, by drugging him and stealing his clothes, car, DNA, and phone so they could plant evidence at the scene of the crime. Pip asked her friends to help her with her plan, and they all agreed without asking specific questions about all her strange requests.

In Chapter 44, the news of Jason’s death broke and Pip tried to act normal by announcing a new season of her podcast: Who Killed Jason Bell? She curated interviews and content designed to lead Detective Hawkins to conclude that Max Hastings killed Jason Bell. In Chapter 46, Detective Hawkins interviewed Pip and asked her why her headphones had been in Jason Bell’s house. Shocked that Jason had taken a trophy from her she had not even missed, Pip did not have a valid answer for Hawkins. She told Ravi that she was going to turn herself in to make sure no one else was implicated in her crime. But Ravi went behind her back to see Hawkins and tell him that he had borrowed Pip’s headphones before going to Jason Bell’s house to talk to him about a fundraiser.

In Chapter 52, Max Hastings was arrested, but in Chapter 53 Pip realized that Hawkins still suspected she had something to do with the whole thing. In Chapter 54, Pip broke up with Ravi to keep him out of harm’s way if Max was found guilty at trial and Hawkins needed a new suspect. In Chapter 55, Pip went to Columbia and cut off ties with all her old friends, family, and Ravi, while waiting for the verdict in Max’s trial. In the epilogue, three minutes after Max Hasting’s trial ended, Sal messaged Pip. Pip immediately began to respond.