A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #3
As Good As Dead
by Holly Jackson
Contents
Eight
Overview
Triggered by another ominous email, Pip spirals into a PTSD flashback, steadies herself with a pill, and investigates a pattern of anonymous threats dating back months. She connects prior incidents—tweets, emails, dead flowers, an empty envelope, chalk figures, and dead pigeons—into an escalating timeline and begins formally tracking a possible stalker.
Summary
Pip drops her phone after receiving another threatening message and is thrust into a vivid PTSD flashback of the farmhouse, blood, and Charlie. Overwhelmed, she takes a pill from her hidden stash to ground herself, repeating that she is here and now, not then and there.
Regaining focus, Pip considers whether the new message—paired with dead pigeons and chalk figures—signals targeted harassment. She searches her email and Twitter, uncovering a trail of identical messages asking, “Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?” dating back to April, increasing in frequency over time.
Pip recalls two earlier offline incidents she had dismissed: a bouquet of roses with the heads picked off left on her car at Stanley Forbes’s funeral, and a later empty envelope with her name pushed through her door. Weighing these alongside the chalk figures and the pigeons, she recognizes a potential escalation in both severity and occurrence.
Determined to separate fear from fact, Pip researches stalking, defines the scope of “disappear,” and builds a spreadsheet logging every incident—online messages and offline acts—by date and severity. As her mum calls for dinner, Pip commits to tracking the pattern, suspecting she is being stalked and that the situation is worsening.
Who Appears
- Pippa Fitz-Amobi (Pip)Protagonist; experiences a PTSD episode, investigates months of anonymous threats, links prior incidents, and starts a stalker-tracking spreadsheet.
- Anonymous senderUnseen antagonist sending repeated “who will look for you” messages; likely behind escalating offline incidents.
- Pip’s mumCalls Pip to dinner, briefly grounding the scene in normalcy.