Who Is The Killer In 'A Good Girl'S Guide To Murder'?

Question

Finished Holly Jackson's YA thriller and can't get over that final twist. Would love to discuss the identity of the Fairview murderer without spoiling it for new readers.

Lorena · Answer

Note: The central mystery of this novel is given away in the final few chapters. The connection between the central mystery and Pip’s investigation of the town and its residents is also given away. If you like this kind of unraveling to find out that the truth changes everything then you may like ‘Murderer’. This novel is given entirely through in a series of police interview transcripts with a murderer who claims to be innocent. The entire plot depends on the gaps in his story and the contradictions in his testimony.

Lincoln · Answer

In ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ by Holly Jackson, the killer is Max Hastings, a genuinely menacing figure. A man of two faces: to the public he is a sweet, kind gentleman; to those he killing he is a terrifying monster. Hastings is able to use his privilege to silence Andie, the teenager investigating his crimes, by bullying her into silence and then framing up an innocent man for his own heinous crimes. Here, Pip is able to expose Hastings’ arrogance as he underestimates the intelligence of a teenager. It is also pleasantly surprising that the killer of the main character is someone close to the other victim, so not a ‘random’ killer.

Ruby · Answer

Golum Babies – Golum Babies is a great read about the golden boy Max Hastings, the villain you love to hate. Unfortunately he underestimated Pip in this dark twisted tale of murder and deceit. The author plays cleverly with all the current true-crime hype and really digs into the toxic relationships and secrets that small communities are so riddled with. Max’s guilt goes far beyond his actions in murdering Poppy, it’s his systematic lies to deceive others in his pursuit of appearances.

Holden · Answer

In this scenario, it is Max Hastings, Andie’s boyfriend, who harbors hidden cruelty beneath his handsome, all-American façade. Through Max, particularly in contrast to Pip’s genuinely hard work at solving Andie’s murder, we see the contrast between violence and non-violence, and it is also extremely telling of the way society commonly dismisses young girls like Andie until it is too late to help them. Max’s downfall is very exposed in the final scenes of the novel when the cordially(repulsive) Hastings finally confronts Andie’s killer in the woods in an extremely revealing and visceral confrontation which brings out both Pip’s remarkable tenacity as well as Max’s considerable cowardice.

Uriah · Answer

At the end of 'A Good Girl's Guide to Murder', it is revealed that the killer of Andie Bell was in fact her boyfriend Max Hastings. The twist is great because Max had manipulated so many people in the story including the main character Pip. He had set up Andie’s dad Sal Singh for the crime and the true reason he had done this was because Andie had found out that Max was dealing drugs and had been abusing her.

The twist was brilliant. Max Hastings was so ordinary yet so terrifying in his enormity as a predator. I admired how Poppett slowly pieced together Max’s perfect alibis and how Max played off of the small town prejudices against Sal, the father of the murdered girl. It was such a powerful read that it really showed how in plain sight evil can reside and it was a wonderful yet chilling read to the end.

Olive · Answer

Holly Jackson builds towards a killer reveal of not only murder but also of society’s failures. His nemesis, Max Hastings, is a rather arrogant, entitled, privileged teenager whose actions are enabled by the indifference of those around him. Conversely, Sal Singh is so unfairly discriminated against by the town’s prejudices that it is almost as if Jackson is commenting on current events. The way in which Hastings is outsmarted by Pip, the ‘good girl’, is especially great because his arrogance was such that he never would have thought her capable.

Araceli Ortega · Answer

Wait, is this for the entire series or just the first book? The rest of the series takes a complete and utter dive but for the sake of clarity in relation to the first book only, it was indeed Max who killed Andie Bell. The subsequent books deal with the after effects of that and further mysteries but the central crime of the first book is cleared up for readers and they get a complete and satisfying answer to the mystery of Andie Bell’s death by the end of the book.

Abigail Phillips · Answer

I wish there were alternate endings to discuss with the author. For example, would another character have fit the drug dealer connection so perfectly? I think not. By making the killer Max Hastings, a main character and Fairview’s Golden Boy, the author ties the town’s biggest crime directly to the center of its very complex social structure. An outsider would not have served the same purpose to comment on the Fairview with which the author chose to work.

That's far more powerful than an outside threat. It suggests corruption from within. While some of the other suspects might have been surprising choices, Jackson has made the right choice in opting for the story he wants to tell about secrets, image and corruption in a seemingly idyllic community and Max Hastings is the golden boy who fits the bill.

M. Merrill · Answer

We see the killer revealed to Max in a "reconstruction of the crime" scene. Pip outlines the timeline of events, the motive for the murder and the opportunity that the killer had to commit it. We see the evidence used to come to these conclusions: a Spotify playlist with a specific timestamp on a track, a log of deleted messages, and the social media activity of the characters at specific times and locations.

The solution to the mystery is grounded in the reality of the characters. Max Hastings isn’t fooled by a professional detective. Instead, he is duped by a similarly aged peer who is more familiar with the digital landscape of today than most adults. The ‘who’ of the killer is a single name but the ‘how’ he was proven to be the murderer is so uniquely of today to be so fresh and different to the standard archetype of the golden boy who seems perfect on the outside but is hideously evil on the inside.

Bobby Baggett · Answer

The surprise was ruined when I accidentally read Max Hastings comments elsewhere. Despite this I still enjoyed Pip’s process of reading the book.

Lea Figuereo · Answer

Andie Bell set this tragedy in motion through her own actions. Blackmailing someone, particularly of the sort of disposition to deal in drugs, is incredibly dangerous and it doesn’t matter that she ended up getting murdered. Throughout the book it is clear that the secret, often fraught relationship between Andie Bell and Max Hastings had been descending into a toxic power struggle and Max’s actions, while horrific in their end result, were an escalation of the same dreadful dynamic that Andie had been engaged in.

The moral ambiguity of the central characters in the novel makes for compelling reading. Andie Bell was a nasty piece of work; Max Hastings a perfect facade; Sal a man with secrets to hide; and Pip a rather imperfect victim/sleuth. All of the main characters in the novel make mistakes of one sort or another and it is these mistakes that form the basis of the central crime and its solution. The killer is of this world and emerges from the same gray area as the rest of the characters.

Bushra Omayr · Answer

My favorite aspect of the story so far is that the murder weapon is simply a rock that Hastings threw at Hastings’ father’s head, rather than bringing some sort of deadly weapon to the scene. The first part of the murder was clearly an impulse, and the framing of the second part is what’s cold. Max Hastings is a very hot-headed and somewhat reckless kid who lost control of his temper in the worst possible way, but he’s also a very cold and calculating sociopath who continued to try to cover up his actions long after the fact.

Max is not a neat and clever master criminal. Rather he is a smart, young, impulsive and scared teenager who does something dreadful and then tries to cover up his handprints to save his own neck. It’s not pleasant to read but it is so much more believable and frightening because it could happen to anyone. He’s not a nasty piece of work. He’s the boy next door who by some strange twist of circumstances finds something dreadful in himself and then chooses to use it for his own ends.

Jonathan Calixto · Answer

For me, it was a bit of a letdown that the killer was Max Hastings. At first, I was hoping it would be Pip’s brother or someone minor that we hadn’t paid much attention to early on in the story. But no, Max, the popular, privileged boyfriend, was the killer. And while the writing in this story is excellent, Max is just the most conventional choice for a killer in a story such as this. His discovery is really all because of Pip.

In retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that the killer was Max Hastings, the boyfriend of popular and privileged Pip. However, the actual identity of the killer was almost incidental to the reading experience. The true heart of the novel lies within the sixty-page or so climax where Pip slowly but surely pieces together the identity of the killer. And in this timeframe, as she grapples with the growing realization of who it is, so too does the reader. Together, they slowly reach the awful conclusion, and it’s a heart-pounding reading experience in which Pip must prove her conclusions while fighting for her life.

Who Is The Killer In 'A Good Girl'S Guide To Murder'?

13 Answers

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