A review by beckyyreadss
As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I wanted to read this book because I was on a mission to discover new authors last year. I have seen this book around for years and one of my best friends kept pushing me and pushing me to read this series. So, I bought the series and I understand why she would recommend this book, this series has been a complete whirlwind. Please check trigger warnings before reading this book and some triggers are briefly mentioned below. I was wondering how Holly was going to end this series, and it wasn’t anything I was expecting it to be.  

This book is based on a young woman named Pippa Fitz-Amobi who is known as Pip. Pip is about to head off for university, but she is still haunted by the way her last investigation ended. She's used to online death threats in the wake of her viral true-crime podcast, but she can’t help noticing an anonymous person who keeps asking her: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Soon the threats escalate, and Pip realizes that someone is following her in real life. When she starts to find connections between her stalker and a local serial killer caught six years ago, she wonders if maybe the wrong man is behind bars. Police refuse to act, so Pip has only choice: find the suspect herself – or be the next victim. As the deadly game plays out, Pip discovers that everything in her small town is coming full circle and if she doesn’t find the answers, this time she will be the one who disappears. 

This book is a completely different vibe to the other books, I know that her other books in this series is dark but it’s about cold cases or people she cares about – there has never been a case surrounding her. Holly Jackson has a way of making a slow build-up be worth it. The first 25% of this book, you don’t even realise she has a stalker until the messages start appearing outside her house. I went into this book blind, so I thought it was going to be Pip solving a cold case and the after math of the Max Hastings case. And it was completely different that when the action finally happened, I was screaming and throwing this book around. The plot twists were insane! I liked the way it was linked together from the first murder and why the murders happened, and it was all tied in a neat little bow.  

There were a few things I didn’t like and usually I don’t rate a book five stars if I didn’t like something, but I could see why it happened and why it was done that I'm giving this book five stars still. The first one the kidnapping chapters and the murders - I felt like they were a bit rushed and was questioning why we still had 200 pages left (by the end of book, I realise why). The cliffhanger was mean, I wanted to know what happened to Max and Ravi and Pip. There was no epilogue, no five years later – it was mean, I know what it was implying with that last page, but I wanted something concrete. 

This series was really enjoyable, and this book was a lot darker than the other two, but I think that’s why I loved it so much. Hopefully this isn’t the end of Pip, and we see her again in the future.  
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