Ratings:
Star Rating: ★★★★★
If This Book Was a Movie Rating: PG-13
Review:
In all the reading I've done, I've figured out one thing: the best crime novels aren't about how a random detective in a random town solved a random murder. The very best crime novels pry apart emotions, strip away morality, and delve into the darkest parts of the human heart. They take all your standards of justice and challenge each of them, one after another.
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, and now Good Girl, Bad Blood, are two of those novels.
no spoilers
While the plot was brilliant and full of twists, the characters are what really makes this book so heartwrenching. As uncomfortable as it is to shine a light on ugly things, Holly Jackson does just that, vividly painting how broken and painful each of us are, even those who are meant to exact justice.
Our "random" detective is Pip, someone who, by every conventional trope, should be the good girl. She is the straight-A student, the one who's kind and caring and hates it when bad things happen to good people. She should be the one who seeks justice because they believe in the good of humanity, of fairness, of right and wrong, of the inevitability of justice.
But Pip is not that person. She lies, she steals, she manipulates, she blackmails. She knowingly walks through that gray area between right and wrong and can't find it in herself to care. She handles her cases the way she does, not because she believes in the good of humanity or the inevitability of justice, but because she has seen just how awful humanity can be.
The book also touches on other topics: justice, forgiveness, and the whole domino effect of murder.
There will never be true justice. As much as we complain about how broken and corrupt our justice systems are, there's no way to completely fix it. Sometimes the killer will get away. Sometimes the innocent are bullied and shamed. Sometimes the person that searches for the criminal is just as awful as those they're searching for. That shouldn't mean we stop seeking justice, but know this: we can do our best, but there will never be perfect justice.
This book, even more than the first one, explores forgiveness. Giving people second chances, even when there is no way in hell they deserve it. Maybe there is hope for some of these people. Maybe one of them could be saved. It's impossible to escape the demons of your past when no one will let you forget and try again.
Finally, Holly Jackson truly illustrates how murder is never about just one person. One death kills a army of people, breaking them and hurting them and making them bleed out. One death could have been prevented by a whole other army of people, people that stood on the sidelines and did nothing while the world went up in flames. In the end, who really was the murderer? Was it the one who pulled the trigger? Or all those who stood by and looked away?
I don't know any of the answers to these questions. Maybe there are no answers, maybe there isn't a solution.
I suppose it all depends, really, on the details of the case.
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