There’s nothing like a new YA mystery to bring you back to your school days of marathoning Pretty Little Liars and theorizing about A’s identity. Enter, Netflix’s adaptation of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, the best-selling 2019 novel by Holly Jackson.
The new series follows a British teen named Pip who uses her senior thesis project to get to the bottom of a five-year-old crime in her small town and uncovers more than she could have ever predicted. If you want to take a peek ahead before streaming the six-episode season, here’s the A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder book ending and plot summary.
Trigger warning: This summary contains mentions of sexual assault and suicide.
Five years before Pip’s story begins, a popular student named Andie disappeared. Days later, her boyfriend, Sal, was found in the woods. He’d apparently died by suicide, and confessed to Andie’s murder by text.
While the entire town believes Sal killed Andie, Pip is skeptical. She befriends Sal’s brother, Ravi, and the two work together to investigate the case.
Throughout the book, Pip learns a lot of surprising information about Andie, including her involvement in selling drugs and that she was seeing an older man. Pip also receives threatening messages urging her not to investigate further.
There’s a break in the case when Pip and Ravi deduce, from a time-stamped photo at a party, that Sal would never have been able to murder Andie the night he allegedly did.
Ultimately, Pip learns that the person who’d been sending her threatening messages was Elliot Ward, a teacher and family friend. She confronts him about this, and learns that Elliot was secretly seeing Andie. One day they got into a fight, and Elliot pushed her into a desk. She ran away and Elliot assumed she died, so he brought Sal out to the woods — under the guise of looking for Andie — and killed him, staging his death and confession so that no one would suspect Elliot.
Elliot later found someone he thought to be Andie walking on the street, disoriented. He kept her in his attic for five years, but it wasn’t actually Andie.
So, what did happen to Andie?
Sally Mais/NetflixIn the final pages of the book, Pip learns that Andie came home after Elliot’s house. She met her younger sister, Becca, who had been sexually assaulted at a party, and learned that Andie was the one who sold roofies to the perpetrator. The girls fought, and Andie fell down. Having already been injured, she got sick and began to choke, and Becca, angry, didn’t help her. She hid her body in a septic tank.
Back in the present day, Becca tries to kill Pip as well. However, Ravi and the police arrive before she can do so. Pip survives and begins a relationship with Ravi, whose brother’s name has finally been restored.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit hotline.rainn.org.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 to contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which provides free 24/7 support. You can also reach out to the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860, the Trevor Lifeline at 1-866-488-7386, or to your local suicide crisis center.
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