As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson

Will contain spoilers!

Genre/s:

YA Thriller

Themes:

Murder, Injustice

Rating:

Description:

Pip Fitz-Amobi is haunted by the way her last investigation ended. Soon she’ll be leaving for Cambridge University but then another case finds her . . . and this time it’s all about Pip.

Pip is used to online death threats, but there’s one that catches her eye, someone who keeps asking: who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? And it’s not just online. Pip has a stalker who knows where she lives. The police refuse to act and then Pip finds connections between her stalker and a local serial killer. The killer has been in prison for six years, but Pip suspects that the wrong man is behind bars. As the deadly game plays out, Pip realises that everything in Little Kilton is finally coming full circle. If Pip doesn’t find the answers, this time she will be the one who disappears . . .

My thoughts:

My main thought about As Good As Dead is can I go back to the start and erase this from my mind? This is not at all how I would have expected or wanted the ending to go, I just did not like the turn it took at all. It made me deeply uncomfortable and it sends such a bad message for a YA novel. For me Pip as a relatable character has been completely ruined, she has changed too much for the worse and so much of this story is just vastly out of character. Holly is a great writer and this book is no different but the plot was just plain awful and ridiculous in the second half.

Pip has witnessed a man dying in front of her and has PTSD that is negatively affecting her life. She is pretending she is fine to her friends and family but really she is struggling to sleep and is seeing Stanley’s death everywhere she goes. She has also started buying Xanax illegally to help her sleep, it doesn’t really seem to be working. To make things worse Max Hastings has decided to sue her for defamation which is a bit ridiculous but as he won his criminal trial it makes sense. Pip is not having any of it and refuses to settle, she wants to take him to court again so people can see the truth this time. She also takes up running as a way to get away from her pain and often crosses paths with Max.

Pip soon starts to notice weird things, chalk marks that look like headless stick figures and dead pigeons on her driveway. Everyone around her waves away her concerns and explains them away. But Pip has also been recieving messages asking who will find her if she disappears. She goes to the police but they also explain it away and its clear they think she is still in a bad frame of mind considering what happened with Stanley. And to be fair they are not wrong but they should have taken her more seriously. Because of this Pip investigates herself, with the help of Ravi of course.

Her initial search leads her to an article about a serial killer called the DT killer who was caught and arrested six years ago. He killed people by putting duct tape over their faces first, its clear he had a problem with women. Pip has heard of the story, it all happened around the same time as Andie and Sals deaths. There was a mention of the stick figures and dead pigeons by one of the victims sister. Pip doesn’t want to start investigating because if her hunches are true, she is being stalked by a serial killer. Pip does finally get in touch with the convicted killers mother who it turns out had emailed Pip about investigating it for her podcast. She has been trying to free her son ever since she got the interview transcript from the police. Pips reads it and finds that the police had basically fed him the answers and kept him awake for hours to gain the confession. Its seeming more and more likely that this man is not the killer.

Pip speaks to the police officer who did the interrogation and finds that most of the evidence against him was to do with his work, which was at the landscaping company owned by Jason Bell. She then meets with the sister of the victim and finds out she was friends with Andie Bell. Andie got in contact with her after her sister was killed and they became friends. It seems like a weird thing for her to do but through this we find out Andie had a secret email. It also explains some of her diary entries that were found in the first book. Pip manages to get access to this email by asking Becca who she has been keeping in contact with whilst she is in prison. On this account she finds a draft email, it pretty much explains why Andie did everything she did. She knew who the DT killer was and it was someone who spent time at her house. Andie wanted to get away from him and did what she did to go with Sal in Oxford then planned to go back for Becca when she was done with school.

What I don’t understand is how Pip does not see the obvious connection here. She ends up going to the Bell house and speaking with Jason, asking about the alarm that went off the night Andie died. He basically tells her to never talk to his family again. Pip seems to suspect Daniel De Silva once again, the email mentioned how Andie couldn’t go to the police because he was basically one of them. Daniel started at the police around about this time and Pip finds he did make some enquiries into the murders. She has recently become friends with his sister after she was there for her when Max Hastings verdict came in.

One night Pip is awoken by her printer going off, she can see a page is printing with the same message she has been getting online. Its a wireless printer so that means whoever is close by could access it but before she can do anything else her speaker starts blasting heavy metal music and wakes up her family. She has also started to get prank calls where the caller does not say anything. She has decided to download an app to get the number the next time it calls. She still hasn’t told anyone other than Ravi about all this after the detective didn’t believe her even though she has more evidence now.

She is on her way to Nats house to ask about her brother when she gets another call, she uses the app and gets the number. But when she calls it back she can hear it ringing near her. Someone then grabs her, knocking her phone from her hands and puts her into the boot of a car. She is taken to the company Green Scene she was looking into and, a surprise to no one, the DT killer and her stalker is none other than Jason Bell. I really have no clue how she didn’t see that, she always seems to blame Daniel for everything.

Its made very clear that Jason has a problem with loud women and he thinks they should all just listen to him. It explains the way he acted towards his family and I did like how everything links back to the story of Andie from book one. Jason has not killed anyone since Andies death mostly because of the media attention on him. But Pip is about to be his sixth victim, he lets her talk and she tells him how Andie and Becca hate him and all they wanted was to get away from him. But he manages to one up her by admitting that it was him who killed her dog after seeing Becca release him in the park. He didn’t know it was Pips but thought Becca and her mum had gone against his wishes and got a pet. Once Pip starts swearing at him he starts covering her face in duct tape, leaving her nostrils uncovered. He then leaves her, this was part of his MO before although she is not sure why, maybe to scare his victims more?

Pip is terrified, she has never been this scared in her life and she really feels like this is it for her she is going to die. But with Ravis voice inside her head she manages to calm down enough to try and escape. She manages to get a screw out of the shelf behind her but when it is taken away stuff falls on her knocking it out of her hands. She does however manage to knock over the shelf and slide her hands out under the pole she is attached to. She takes off the duct tape and then breaks a window and gets away. At this point I was really unsure of where this was going to go, this is only the half way point and we know who the DT killer is. I’m assuming the rest will be spent proving he did it and not the man in prison. Boy was I wrong.

Pip starts to run away thinking she will call the police but then she starts to doubt that they will believe her. In the past she has had bad experiences with the police and she no longer believes in the justice system because of Max. Jasons car then pulls up to the building and as he is unlocking the door Pip makes the decision to hit him over the head with a hammer multiple times. She kills him, Pip has literally murdered Jason Bell because she does not trust the police. This is really where the book takes a turn for the worse and changes Pips character completely.

Pip manages to call Ravi on a burner phone Jason has, he comes to her and she tells him what happened. Ravi tells her to go to the police and explain what happened and how it was self defence. But Pip questions what they would say because according to them the DT killer is in prison. She manages to convince Ravi that they should cover up what happened. They come up with a very far fetched and elaborate scheme to get away with murder. They need to slow down the decaying process so they can manipulate the time of death window. They use Jasons car with the air con and heat to do this. But they also need a scapegoat so Pip decides they should frame Max Hastings for this murder instead.

Ravi and Pip part ways to work on their alibis, Pip decides that she will be the one to work on framing Max. She manages to get roofies from her drug dealer and ropes in Nat, Connor and Jamie to help her without really telling them what is happening. She slips the drugs into Maxs water bottle as Nat distracts him, she ends up punching him in the face when she sees Pip is still around. Pip grabs some stuff from his house that she will need to frame him and some of his hair when he passes out. She gets Connor and Jamie to drive to where Jason is to drop off Max’s phone. Pip then goes out with Cara and her sister to McDonald’s so she can have an alibi for the night. Her and Ravi then meet up to clean the scenes and plant evidence.

Honestly this whole thing made me so uncomfortable, this is not the Pip and Ravi we know and love. I could see why Pip had lost faith in the system, that’s pretty normal but to use that as an excuse to kill someone and rope all your friends into it. I found myself torn between hoping she would get caught and wanting her to get a chance to live her life. Pip also decides to make it the focus of her podcast because she believes it is what people will expect from her and shes right. The police do want to talk to her about the case, Pip decides to say she thinks they will need her help and being a little bit cocky about it. She thinks it is all going well until the detective starts asking her about headphones and if she uses her daily. She thinks its a weird thing to ask about until he brings in some evidence, her headphones that were found in Jasons house. Pip has no recollection of seeing them over the last 10 days since Jason took her. She realises that they were meant to be the trophy for killing her and Jason must have taken them. She quickly leaves the station after this.

Pip thinks she has been caught now that there is a link between her and Jason and she lied about the last time she saw him. She decides the better course of action would be to confess and she tells Ravi this. He is obviously unhappy about her choice but he seems to accept it. She decides to spend a last meal with her family and then goes round to see Ravi. But he is not there, she thinks he is just angry with her and doesn’t want to have to say goodbye. So she heads to the station but on her way she sees Ravi’s car and they stop. Turns out he is just coming from the station where he told them he took her headphones to Jasons house when asking him about a scholarship he was thinking of setting up. He downright lied but now Pip doesn’t need to confess and they can live their lives together.

She decides not to confess and then the police find all the evidence that is pointing to Max as the killer although he is adamant he didn’t do it. Pip finishes up her podcast but also decides she can help the man convicted of being the DT killer by handing over evidence that it was Jason. She also starts to realise that there was evidence that linked Jason to the other crimes and if she had just reported him they would have found that evidence when they took Jasons prints if they looked into her story. She could have avoided killing him. The detective makes a commment that to Pip seems as if he still has a suspicion that she was involved somehow. Pip decides that until the trial is over and Max is convicted she will have no contact with Ravi, and her friends and family to keep them safe. To me this seems more suspicious but she doesn’t seem to be as smart in this book.

I am very unhappy with how the second half of this book went, it completely ruins Pips character and her role model status. I get that she had been becoming darker throughout the trilogy but literal murder? Seems a bit of a reach for her. I also hate how Ravi ended up going along with it all and not trying harder to get her to go to the police. I don’t think loving someone means you look at them exactly the same if they killed someone especially when it was a choice. I think it sends a very bad message for a YA book, if you are smart enough you can get away with murder. If you lose faith in the system why not take it into your own hands by murdering someone and then framing another person for it. Yes they were both bad men, very bad but this is not at all how she should have dealt with it. Max was a rapist yes but does that mean he deserves to be put away for murder which is a far longer sentence. She went against everything she supposedly believed in and I just really do not like it. Also Pip was struggling to sleep after seeing Stanley dead but killing a man seems to have had no impact on her mental health, she doesn’t even seem to feel regret or bad about what she has done. To me this was like a completely different character. It was an unpredictable plot twist but more because we never would have believed Pip would do something like this. We had seen her be angry about the injustices but never like this.

The first half of the book was good and I was interested to see more about the Bell family and how it linked back to what happened in the first book. There were a couple of small loose ends and it was good to find out what the deal with Jason was. I liked how it explored mental health and the coping mechanisms Pip employed but I didn’t like how suddenly this disappeared after she killed Jason. Holly Jackson is a great writer and I love the research that must have went into this, I’d definitely read her other works but I’m just so disappointed with the ending of this series. At the end of this book all I wanted was to go back to the innocence of Pip in the first book, back to the girl I found so relatable. I want the Pip who fights against injustice in the right ways, not the one who creates injustice.