(Credit: BBC)

Following its initial premiere on the BBC earlier this year, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder has enjoyed a debut week on Netflix befitting the rave reviews it’s already received. This partial adaptation of Holly Jackson’s YA crime novel offers everything a Gen-Z audience is looking for in a streaming smash. There’s a murder mystery, teenage romance, wild parties, compelling characters, and struggles with drugs, sexual abuse and mental health handled with empathy.

It’s only natural, then, that the series has rocketed straight to number one in the Netflix charts around the world. Lead actors Emma Myers and Zain Iqbal are stars in the making, and director Dolly Wells has graduated well and truly from the British alternative comedy scene to make Hollywood sit up and take note. And can expect to see the rest of Jackson’s original novel adapted over at least two further seasons of the show.

The “good girl” at the heart of the series is Myers’ character Pip Fitz-Amobi, a high-schooler attempting to investigate the killing of Andie Bell, a girl from her school, five years previously. At the time it was ruled to be a murder-suicide by the girl’s boyfriend Sal, but Pip is convinced there’s more to it.

At first, she suspects the secret older boyfriend she discovers Andie had been dating at the same time as she was seeing Sal before finding out she was also a drug dealer. Pip then tries to locate Andie’s drug supplier, finally settling on Dan Da Silva, the brother of one of Andie’s closest friends. Da Silva admitted that he was involved with Andie but that his role in the whole sordid succession of events related to her death was limited to covering up a drunk driving accident Sal and his friend Max Hastings were involved in.

So who really did it?

Max is one of the two persons of interest leading Pip to the real killer. The other is Naomi Ward who is ironically the sister of her own best friend, Cara. Naomi accidentally calls Pip from the number she acquired when searching for the older man Andie was involved with. The man she was actually looking for wasn’t Dan Da Silva, after all, but Cara and Naomi’s father Elliot. 

In the season’s penultimate episode, Pip has a showdown with Elliot in which he reveals how he began as Andie’s tutor before beginning an underage affair with her. When he ignored her attempts to blackmail her for money, the two fought and Elliot split her head open on a countertop. Since he assumed he was responsible for her death, he murdered Sal and framed him for Andie’s death.

Yet Elliott wasn’t Andie’s killer. At most, he was only partly responsible for her injuries. Pip subsequently discovers that Andie’s own sister Becca had been drugged and raped by Max, using Rohypnol supplied by Andie. She goes to the Bell household to question Becca about the incident, where a surprise awaits her.

Becca recounts how shaken she was upon hearing the truth from her sister. “She was the one who sold Max Hastings the drugs that he used to rape you,” she recalls thinking. When Andie then told Becca she planned to run away, and leave her behind with their violently abusive father, she snapped.

“I guess I lashed out. I lost it,” she admits, as we watch a flashback of Becca inflicting a relatively minor bang on Andie’s head. “And she was just lying there. She was just there. And she was vomiting, and she was choking,” at least in part due to the head wound she’d already sustained from the fight with Elliot. “And I just stood there. I just stood there and I watched her die. It was awful.”

Having revealed her guilt to Pip, Becca then tries to poison her and dump her in the same cesspit in which she disposed of her sister’s body. Cara and Sal’s brother Ravi arrive just in time to save her. And ensure there’s more mystery-solving to come from Pip in further seasons.