Good Girl, Bad Blood

Back in Little Kilton

Pip Fitz-Amobi promised herself — and her family — that she was finished with investigations after the events of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. She has her university application essays to write, her relationship with Ravi to nurture, and a community still processing what the Andie Bell case revealed about itself. She is done.

Then Jamie Reynolds disappears on the night of the town’s memorial event, and his younger brother Connor — Pip’s friend — is desperate. The police are treating it as a voluntary absence. Pip cannot ignore it. What begins as a favour to a friend becomes, once again, something that threatens everything she values — this time broadcast live to a growing audience of podcast listeners who want answers in real time.

The Podcast as Form and Ethics

The most significant structural addition in Good Girl, Bad Blood is the true crime podcast format. Pip begins recording her investigation, and the podcast transcripts — audience questions, listener theories, the growing pressure of public attention — become part of the novel’s mixed-media texture in the same way the case files did in the first book. Holly Jackson uses this addition not just as a format innovation but as an ethical interrogation: what does it mean to turn real people’s worst moments into content? What does an audience’s appetite for resolution do to the people who are living the story?

This is Jackson thinking seriously about the true crime genre she is working within — aware that the pleasure of following an investigation comes at a cost to the people the investigation involves, and willing to make that cost visible rather than papering over it.

Pip, Changed

One of Good Girl, Bad Blood’s most accomplished elements is its handling of what the first book’s events have done to Pip. She is not the same person. The confidence that drove her original investigation has been complicated by the knowledge of what it led to, and Jackson resists the temptation to let her protagonist remain comfortably heroic. Pip is compelling precisely because she is beginning to understand that her compulsion to investigate has costs she was not initially able to see.

The mystery itself is assembled with the same fair-play discipline Jackson demonstrated in the debut — clues planted, red herrings functional but not dishonest, resolution earned rather than manufactured. The second book in a YA series faces particular pressure to match the debut’s momentum while deepening the world; Good Girl, Bad Blood manages both.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A confident, thematically ambitious sequel that uses the true crime podcast format to interrogate the ethics of the genre Pip inhabits, while delivering another carefully constructed mystery.

Connor, Jamie, and the Limits of Help

The second novel sharpens its emotional stakes by making the missing person someone close to Pip’s circle. Jamie Reynolds is the older brother of Connor, Pip’s friend, and his disappearance on the night of Little Kilton’s memorial event means the investigation is personal from the first page in a way the Andie Bell case was not. The police treat Jamie as an adult who has chosen to leave, which is exactly the institutional indifference that pulls Pip back in. Jackson uses this to make a quiet point about who official channels take seriously and who they quietly write off — the same theme that animated the first book, now refracted through a missing-persons case rather than a murder.

The Mechanics of an Audience

What distinguishes Good Girl, Bad Blood structurally is the way the podcast format changes the investigation’s relationship to its audience. In the first book Pip’s documentary record was private, a project she controlled. Here the investigation is broadcast in near-real time, and the listeners are not passive: they send theories, they apply pressure, they generate an appetite for resolution that begins to shape the case itself. Jackson is interested in what that audience does to the person at the centre of it. The crowd wants answers on its own timeline, and the gap between the messy reality of an investigation and the clean narrative an audience demands becomes one of the book’s recurring tensions.

This is the novel where Jackson’s engagement with the ethics of true crime becomes fully explicit. The genre’s central uncomfortable fact — that the pleasure of following a case is built on the worst moments of real people’s lives — is no longer subtext. Pip is producing content, and the content has consequences, and the book refuses to pretend otherwise. That willingness to interrogate the form she is working in is what elevates the series above its many imitators.

A Series Deepening

The middle book of a trilogy carries a particular burden: it must satisfy on its own terms while setting up a conclusion, and it must deepen the protagonist without resolving her. Good Girl, Bad Blood manages both. The Jamie Reynolds case is constructed with the same fair-play discipline as the debut, with clues planted honestly and a resolution that rewards attentive reading. But the more important work is happening to Pip herself. The confidence that drove her first investigation has been complicated by the knowledge of what that investigation cost, and the reader can feel the trilogy bending toward something darker.

By the close, Jackson has set up the final volume’s central reversal — the moment when the investigator becomes the target — without telegraphing it. The book ends on a note that recontextualises everything that came before, and it makes clear that the comfortable investigative formula of the first two books is about to be dismantled. For readers willing to follow Pip into that darker territory, Good Girl, Bad Blood is the essential bridge.