CBR Bingo: Font
I picked Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder for the font square because the book has a lot of different fonts in the text. The book uses a variety fonts to indicate things like the main character Pippa’s interview transcripts, text messages between characters, hand-written notes about the crime, and a scary note that shows up in formal font warning Pippa away from her investigation. I have a fondness (font-ness! hahahaha) for handwriting fonts, and there are some good ones here.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder follows Pippa as she looks into the five-year-old murder of teenaged Andie and the suicide of her boyfriend Sal, who is believed to have killed her. Pippa believes otherwise and sets off to find the real murderer.
The book is a simple read with lots of characters to suspect: friends, other students, a mysterious older man, enemies. I wouldn’t say the tension is taut, but the story ably moves forward, methodically laying out Pippa’s investigation, assisted by her love interest Ravi, Sal’s brother. I confess I did find the book a little slow. There’s not a lot of action; mostly transcripts and dialogue. And Pippa’s dad constantly calling her pickle was an annoying tic.
I found it interesting that the murder victim, Andie, was an unlikeable bully. On one hand, pretty refreshing and leads to a lot of suspects, as noted above. On the other, hard to get invested in finding out who killed her. The much more sympathetic character is Sal, which makes sense since Pippa is determined to prove he was innocent of the murder.
The mystery’s solution was okay. There was a mild twist and it all more or less made sense. Pip’s ability to get a full, detailed confession from the killer was a little much. But then, so was the premise of a teenager setting out to solve two murders as her senior capstone project. At the end there is a big school assembly and everyone claps, while her dad whistles through his fingers going “Yeah!” A bit r/thathappened but what the hey. A decent mystery I mildly enjoyed.
