Holly Jackson
Holly Jackson has published 11 books across 3 series. The recommended reading order starts with As Good As Dead (2021).
Holly Jackson is an English author who writes YA thrillers. Born in 1992 and raised in Buckinghamshire, she finished her first novel at fifteen—terrible, by her own admission, but the start of something that stuck. She went on to earn a first-class degree and a Master's in English, training that shows in the tight plotting and sharp dialogue that would define her work.
Jackson made her debut in 2019 with A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, the first book in a series that became a phenomenon. The story follows a teen detective unraveling cold cases with relentless logic and moral complexity, blending true crime structure with YA heart in a way that turned amateur sleuthing into appointment reading. The series landed a television adaptation that aired on BBC Three and Netflix, proof that her mysteries resonate far beyond the page.
She now lives in London, where her process is fueled by the same obsessions her readers share: true crime documentaries, detective work, the thrill of piecing together what others missed. Between drafts she plays video games and reads constantly. What makes Jackson essential is that she writes mysteries that respect a reader's intelligence—no hand-holding, no cheap twists, just clean and confident storytelling that trusts you to keep up.
Shelf & Shadows
Chronological Order of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Books
- S&SAs Good As DeadHolly JacksonCover coming soon
As Good As Dead
Tagsyoung-adultcrimethrillermysterysuspensechildrenDescriptionPip Fitz-Amobi is standing at the threshold of college, but the past won't let her cross. The investigations that made her name—the ones that turned her into a true-crime podcaster with a following—have left her marked. Death threats arrive with regularity now. The cost of exposure is high. The air around her feels different these days, thick with unease. Someone anonymous keeps circling back to her with a question, cryptic and insistent, the kind that lodges itself under your skin. Pip can't ignore it. She never could ignore a mystery, even when ignoring it might save her life. This time, the question feels personal. Dangerous. Inescapable. This is the final installment in the trilogy, and Holly Jackson doesn't ease up. The tension coils tighter here, the stakes more intimate than before. Pip has solved crimes for others; now the crime is closing in on her. The humor that punctuated earlier books still flickers through, but it's darker now, edged with something raw. What makes this work is the emotional weight Jackson allows her protagonist to carry. Pip isn't just clever—she's haunted, exhausted, and still moving forward. The plot twists and accelerates, but it's her unraveling that holds you. A thriller that understands the toll of survival, and the cost of being the one who always asks questions.Publication dateSeptember 28, 2021Amazon rating4.4/5Print length464LanguageEnglishPublisherDelacorte Press - S&SKill JoyHolly JacksonCover coming soon
Kill Joy
Tagsyoung-adultmysterycrimesuspensethrillerDescriptionPip isn't in the mood for games, especially not a murder mystery party complete with 1920s costumes and a fictional island called Joy, but her friend's invitation leaves little room for refusal. She arrives reluctant, skeptical, ready to endure the evening rather than enjoy it—but something shifts once the game begins, and she finds herself pulled into the elaborate world of clues, secrets, and staged deception. The challenge is simple enough: six suspects, three hours, one murder to solve. As Pip moves through the party, piecing together the identity of Reginald Remy's killer, her instincts sharpen and her mind clicks into that familiar rhythm of investigation. But the pretend mystery isn't the only puzzle occupying her thoughts—there's something else lurking beneath the surface, a real case that won't let her go, even as she plays at being a detective in a world of make-believe. Holly Jackson delivers a clever, layered story that blurs the line between game and reality, where every clue might mean more than it seems and Pip's sharp, relentless mind refuses to rest. It's a taut, atmospheric dive into the kind of mystery that feels like both an escape and a trap, perfect for readers who love their suspense wrapped in wit and their detectives unable to turn off the part of themselves that always needs to know the truth.Publication dateFebruary 28, 2023Amazon rating4.1/5Print length208LanguageEnglishPublisherDelacorte Press - S&SA Good Girl's Guide to MurderHolly JacksonCover coming soon
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Tagsyoung-adultmysterycrimesuspensechildrenthrillerDescriptionWhat if the story everyone believes is a lie, and the only person willing to question it is a high school senior with a school project and a stubborn hunch? In the small town of Fairview, the case is closed: pretty, popular Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend Sal Singh, who then took his own life. Five years later, the tragedy still casts a shadow over everything. But Pip can't let it go. She remembers Sal as kind, gentle—nothing like a killer. So for her final school project, she decides to reexamine the case, thinking she'll just poke a few holes in the official story and move on. Except the holes keep getting bigger. The deeper Pip digs, the more she uncovers a tangle of secrets that don't add up, secrets that suggest Sal might have been innocent all along. What starts as an academic exercise quickly spirals into an obsession, blurring the line between past and present, between curiosity and danger. And someone in Fairview is watching. Someone who doesn't want the truth dragged into the light. With echoes of true crime podcasts like Serial, this is a twisty, compulsive thriller that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go. You think you know where it's headed. You don't.Publication dateFebruary 13, 2024Amazon rating4.5/5Print length448LanguageEnglishPublisherElectric Monkey - S&SGood Girl, Bad BloodHolly JacksonCover coming soon
Good Girl, Bad Blood
Tagsyoung-adultcrimemysteryromancesuspensethrillerDescriptionHolly Jackson understands that some towns never stop bleeding. Good Girl, Bad Blood proves it. The atmosphere here is suffocating. Pip Fitz-Amobi swore off detective work after her last case nearly destroyed her. She turned that investigation into a viral true-crime podcast with Ravi Singh. Now she wants out. But her small town won't let her rest. Jamie Reynolds vanishes on the anniversary of two deaths that still haunt the community—Andie Bell and Sal Singh, the victims from Pip's first case. The timing is too deliberate. The police shrug it off. Pip can't. This time, the stakes are different. Everyone is listening. Her podcast gave her an audience, but it also made her vulnerable. As Pip digs into Jamie's disappearance, she uncovers secrets that cut deeper than before. The town's darkness spreads. Jackson writes with relentless momentum, each revelation tightening the noose. The question isn't just whether Pip will find Jamie—it's whether she'll survive what she discovers. This is a sequel that earns its place, darker and more urgent than its predecessor. The clock is ticking. The secrets are multiplying. And Pip is running out of time.Publication dateFebruary 13, 2024Amazon rating4.5/5Print length432LanguageEnglishPublisherElectric Monkey
Order of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Books
- Tagsyoung-adultcrimethrillermysterysuspensechildrenDescriptionPip Fitz-Amobi is packing for college. She's also fielding death threats. Her true-crime podcast made her famous. It also made her a target. The investigations that built her reputation—two solved cases, two communities upended—won't let her go. Now someone anonymous keeps circling back with a question she can't answer. The question follows her. It waits. This is the final book in the trilogy, and Jackson doesn't ease up. The plot coils tight around Pip's unraveling sense of safety. There's humor here, sharp and unexpected, cutting through the dread. There's emotion that lands hard. The stakes aren't abstract anymore—they're personal, immediate, closing in. Jackson knows how to make a reader feel hunted alongside her protagonist. The book earns its place as a conclusion. It doesn't just wrap up a story. It asks what happens when solving crimes becomes the thing that destroys you.Publication dateSeptember 28, 2021Amazon rating4.4/5Print length464LanguageEnglishPublisherDelacorte Press
- Tagsyoung-adultmysterycrimesuspensethrillerDescriptionPip arrives at her friend's murder mystery party reluctant and restless, the last thing she needs is a night of 1920s costumes and theatrical pretense in a fictional town called Joy. But once the game starts and the players gather around the body of the invented Reginald Remy, something shifts—the clues begin to pull at her, the deceptions start to feel familiar, and Pip can't help but slip into the role she knows too well, piecing together motive and opportunity with the same sharp instinct that's defined her before. What begins as an evening of make-believe quickly tangles with something far more real, because Pip's mind won't stay confined to the parlor game unfolding around her. As she navigates the scripted lies and carefully planted evidence, another case shadows her thoughts, one that isn't bound by the rules of a party or the safety of fiction. Holly Jackson returns to the world of her beloved detective with this taut, clever novella that plays with the line between performance and truth, reminding us that for someone like Pip, the instinct to solve never really turns off—even when the stakes are supposed to be imaginary.Publication dateFebruary 28, 2023Amazon rating4.1/5Print length208LanguageEnglishPublisherDelacorte Press
- Tagsyoung-adultmysterycrimesuspensechildrenthrillerDescriptionWhat happens when a small town's settled truth begins to crack under the weight of one determined girl's questions? In Fairview, everyone knows what happened five years ago: pretty, popular Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend Sal Singh, who then took his own life, sealing the case with a tragic finality. But Pip, now a high school senior herself, remembers Sal differently—as the kind older boy from her childhood—and she can't reconcile that memory with the monster everyone believes he became. What begins as a school project to reexamine the closed case quickly transforms into something far more consuming, a descent into obsession that pulls Pip deeper into the shadows of her seemingly ordinary town. The atmosphere thickens with each revelation, each dark secret unearthed from beneath Fairview's polished surface, and the past stops feeling safely distant. Holly Jackson crafts a world where suburban normalcy conceals something rotten, where the line between investigator and target blurs with chilling speed, and where asking the wrong questions can make you the next victim. This is a mystery that grips from the first page and refuses to let go, propelled by Pip's fierce intelligence and the creeping dread that someone in Fairview is watching her every move. With twists that genuinely surprise and an ending that upends everything you thought you knew, Jackson delivers a thriller that understands how dangerous the truth can be when powerful people want it buried.Publication dateFebruary 13, 2024Amazon rating4.5/5Print length448LanguageEnglishPublisherElectric Monkey
- Tagsyoung-adultcrimemysteryromancesuspensethrillerDescriptionPip swore she was done. The podcast went viral, the case is closed, and she's trying to move on. But then Jamie Reynolds vanishes on the night of a memorial—six years after the deaths that tore her town apart. The police shrug it off. Pip can't. She's back in it now, whether she wants to be or not. This time the stakes feel different. Everyone's listening to her podcast, watching her every move, and the secrets she's digging up cut closer to home. The town has more to hide than she thought. Jamie's disappearance isn't random. It's connected to everything—the memorial, the past, the lies people have been telling for years. Pip knows how to investigate, but this case is messier, darker, and more personal. The clock is ticking. Jamie's out there somewhere, and if she doesn't find him soon, it might be too late. Holly Jackson pulls you back into Pip's world with the same addictive urgency that made the first book impossible to put down. The tension is relentless. The twists are sharp. And Pip? She's in deeper than ever.Publication dateFebruary 13, 2024Amazon rating4.5/5Print length432LanguageEnglishPublisherElectric Monkey
Order of Standalone Novels
- Tagsyoung-adultthrillercrimemysterysuspenseDescriptionWhat happens when the people you trust most become suspects in your own survival, and the darkness outside is nothing compared to the secrets lurking within? Red Kenny thought spring break would be a chance to escape with five friends, but when their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere with no cell service, she realizes they've been lured into a trap. Someone out there in the dark wants one of them dead, and they've made sure there's no way out until they get what they came for. With eight hours stretching between them and dawn, the six friends are forced into an impossible choice: find a way to escape into the hostile night, or figure out which one of them is marked for death. But as the hours crawl by and paranoia takes hold, it becomes clear that the greatest danger might not be outside at all—because someone among them is lying, and buried secrets are about to claw their way to the surface. Holly Jackson traps you inside that claustrophobic RV alongside Red and her friends, where every revelation tightens the noose and trust becomes the most dangerous gamble of all. The tension builds with suffocating intensity as alliances shift, motives are questioned, and the body count threatens to rise before sunrise, because in this deadly game of truth and deception, not everyone will make it out alive.Publication dateNovember 29, 2022Amazon rating4.3/5Print length400LanguageEnglishPublisherDelacorte Press
- Tagsyoung-adultthrillermysterysuspensecrimechildrenDescriptionBel Price has spent eighteen years living in the aftermath of a vanishing, her childhood defined by the absence of a mother who disappeared when she was only two years old. The house has always felt haunted by the question no one could answer, the case file gathering dust until a true crime documentary crew arrives to excavate the past. She endures the cameras, the questions, the intrusive reconstruction of a tragedy she barely remembers, counting down the days until they leave and she can return to the careful equilibrium of a life built around a ghost. Then Rachel Price walks back through the door, alive and inexplicably returned after sixteen years, and the ground beneath everything Bel knows begins to crack. The woman who reappears is both familiar and foreign, carrying explanations that don't quite satisfy and a presence that disrupts the fragile narrative the family has constructed in her absence. What should be a miracle feels instead like an unraveling, each answer spawning new and more unsettling questions. Holly Jackson crafts a taut domestic mystery that examines the stories we tell ourselves about loss and the disorienting terror of having those stories rewritten. The novel moves with the precision of a thriller but lingers in the psychological aftermath of reunion, exploring what happens when the dead return and nothing about their resurrection makes sense. This is a story about memory, truth, and the uncanny strangeness of getting back what you thought was lost forever.Publication dateApril 2, 2024Amazon rating4.2/5Print length440LanguageEnglishPublisherDelacorte Press
- TagsmysterysuspensethrillercrimeDescriptionThis book weaponizes a ticking clock like few others can. Jet Mason has seven days before a head injury kills her, and she's going to spend every one of them hunting down whoever attacked her on Halloween night. It's a premise that crackles with urgency and dark irony—a woman who's spent twenty-seven years waiting for her life to start finally has a deadline she can't ignore. Holly Jackson turns what could be a straightforward whodunit into something sharper. Jet isn't a detective or a fighter. She's a rich girl from Vermont who never quite launched, and now she's dying while everyone around her—family, ex-boyfriend, former best friend who married her brother—becomes a suspect. The paranoia is delicious. The stakes are absolute. And as Jet's condition worsens, the clock doesn't just tick, it screams. What makes this sing is the bitterness laced through the suspense. Jet's spent her whole life procrastinating, and now she has one week to do the thing that matters most: finish something. Jackson knows how to make you root for someone who's running out of time and options, armed with nothing but fury and her childhood friend Billy. It's a race against death where the finish line is the truth.Publication dateJuly 22, 2025Amazon rating4.1/5Print length385LanguageEnglishPublisherBantam
Frequently Asked Questions about Holly Jackson
Holly Jackson writes young adult mysteries. The A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series follows Pip Fitz-Amobi as she investigates crimes. Her standalone novels also explore thrilling mysteries. Jackson's work is known for its intricate plotting and engaging characters, making her a popular author in the young adult fiction space. She often weaves in elements of suspense and psychological depth, appealing to readers who enjoy a good puzzle.
A good starting point for Holly Jackson's books is with the first novel in her popular series, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. This book introduces readers to the main character, Pip Fitz-Amobi, and sets up the central mystery that drives the series. Following this book with its sequels will provide a cohesive reading experience. Alternatively, her standalone novels offer a way to sample her writing style without committing to a series.
While some of Holly Jackson's books can be understood on their own, reading the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series in order is recommended for the best experience. The plot and character development build across the books, and later stories may contain spoilers or references to earlier events. Understanding the chronology allows readers to fully appreciate Pip's journey and the unfolding mysteries. Standalone novels, however, do not require prior reading.
Holly Jackson writes both standalone novels and series. Her most well-known work is the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series, which features a recurring protagonist and interconnected storylines. In addition to this series, she has also published several standalone novels that explore different mysteries and characters. This variety allows readers to choose between following a longer narrative arc or enjoying a self-contained story.
Holly Jackson has written at least seven books published between 2021 and 2024, including the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series and several standalone novels. The exact number can fluctuate as authors release new works. Her bibliography includes titles such as As Good As Dead, Kill Joy, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, Good Girl, Bad Blood, Five Survive, and The Reappearance of Rachel Price.
The first book Holly Jackson wrote that was published is A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. This novel launched her career and introduced the character of Pip Fitz-Amobi. It was published in 2019. This book set the stage for the subsequent novels in the series and established Jackson's reputation for crafting compelling young adult mysteries.
As of mid-2024, Holly Jackson's most recent book is The Reappearance of Rachel Price, published in 2024. This novel is part of the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series, serving as a continuation of Pip Fitz-Amobi's story. It delves into new mysteries and character developments, offering readers a fresh installment in the popular young adult crime fiction franchise.
Holly Jackson writes young adult mystery and thriller novels. Her books often feature amateur detectives, true crime investigations, and suspenseful plots. The A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series, for example, centers on a high school student investigating cold cases. Her standalone novels also fall within the mystery and thriller genres, typically involving complex puzzles and unexpected twists.
Ismée Amiel Williams
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Samira Ahmed
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Karen M. McManus
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We verified the reading order for Holly Jackson's books by cross-referencing official publication dates, ISBN databases, and publisher catalogs.
Last verified: April 2026
Shelf & Shadows. (…). “Holly Jackson Books in Order.” Retrieved …, from https://www.shelfandshadows.com/authors/holly-jackson