A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder Deserved a Better Adaptation

Two seasons in, and I’m still grieving

I need you to know that A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder is one of my favourite book series. Top of the list on my phone, no hesitation.

Holly Jackson wrote a YA mystery with mixed media, production logs, interview transcripts, coded documents, and a protagonist whose obsessive brain I related to on a personal level. So when Netflix announced the adaptation, I did what any reasonable book girlie does. I lowered my expectations to the floor, sat down on them, and watched anyway.

Two seasons in and my verdict is this: it’s fine. It’s genuinely entertaining. And it quietly dismantles almost everything that made the books special while I sit there enjoying myself against my better judgment. A complicated situation.

TMJ Rating:

S1: 🍿🍿🍿/5

S2: 🍿🍿🍿🍿/5

So, What’s Going On in A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder?

Pip is a high schooler who decides to reinvestigate the five-year-old murder of Andy Bell as her senior project. Everyone thinks Andy’s boyfriend, Sal, killed her.

Sal confessed and then died by suicide. Pip thinks that’s wrong, and she’s going to prove it with the help of Ravi, Sal’s younger brother, who starts out wanting absolutely nothing to do with her. Season one covers the Andy Bell case. Season two picks up with Max Hastings on trial and a new disappearance threatening to blow everything open again.

If you haven’t read the books, you’re going to have a great time. The mystery is solid, the pacing moves, and the show is very easy to binge. I watched both seasons faster than I’d like to admit.

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The Part Where I Complain About Instagram

Here’s the thing about these books. The whole reason they work so well is the mixed media format. Police reports. Interview transcripts. Pip’s production logs. Coded documents. Fitbit data. You piece things together alongside Pip in a way that makes you feel genuinely clever. It’s interactive and specific, and nobody else is doing it quite like that.

The show replaces all of it with Instagram. Every clue.

One person’s private Instagram leads to another person’s secret Instagram leads to a third Instagram nobody knew existed. I wish I were being dramatic. The interviews, which in the books are these long, psychologically rich conversations where Pip catches people in tiny inconsistencies, get condensed to about three questions and one useful answer before everyone wanders off.

The detective work is basically gone. Pip doesn’t solve things so much as have things handed to her by the plot. That’s a completely different character and a completely different story.

I think about this constantly. It keeps me up at night. Not really, but almost.

What Season One Gets Right

The casting is genuinely good. Zain Iqbal as Ravi is warm and gets the character’s loyalty right, even when the script undersells him. The adult cast is excellent across the board. Anna Maxwell Martin as Pip’s mum has real depth in moments that the book only sketches.

The locations are gorgeous and feel exactly like the world Holly Jackson built. Whoever did the location scouting had a vision and committed to it.

The soundtrack is also doing serious heavy lifting throughout. Opening each episode with a different track that sets the tone was a smart choice, and it lands every time.

Episode five is the best episode of the entire run and briefly becomes the adaptation the whole show should have been. Then it ends, and we go back to Instagram.

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What Season Two Does Better

Honestly, quite a lot.

The emotional investment is higher because two seasons of Pip and Ravi building trust means their dynamic actually carries weight now. Emma Myers commits harder this season, and you can feel it. Pip’s trauma from the Andy Bell case bleeds into everything, and the show handles that with more care than I expected.

The Jamie Reynolds disappearance is a genuinely compelling case. It connects back to season one while introducing new threads, and the pacing across six episodes is tighter than anything season one managed.

Max Hastings on trial with Harry Ashton playing him as precisely the kind of wealthy, self-assured awful that makes your skin crawl is deeply satisfying. The interweaving storylines also work better. Season two understands that mystery threads should collide rather than just run next to each other.

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What Neither Season Fixes

The new characters in season two don’t get enough room to breathe before the show needs them to matter. They feel thin in moments that are supposed to hit emotionally. The main villain reveal is also signposted so heavily by the camera that you’ll have it clocked two full episodes before the show expects you to be shocked.

And Stanley Forbes being cut from season one, I could accept. His absence from season two is the thing that genuinely upset me. Anyone who’s read Good Girl Bad Blood knows why. He’s one of the most surprisingly devastating characters in the whole series, and the show just doesn’t have him.

I’m still not over it.

My Final Verdict: Should You Watch It?

Entertaining, well cast, occasionally great, and a consistently lesser version of something extraordinary.

Read the books first if you haven’t. Then watch the show. Then come and find me so we can be annoyed about the Instagram thing together.

Which did you experience first, the books or the show? Tell me in the comments because I genuinely think it changes everything.