A Good Girl's Guide to Murder: the story so far

Five years earlier Andie Bell had vanished from Little Kilton, and her boyfriend Sal Singh had been found dead in the woods with a text on his phone confessing to it. The town had settled on that. Pippa Fitz-Amobi took the case as a school project because she had known Sal and did not believe a word of it, and talked his brother Ravi into helping her.

Underneath was a different town. Andie had been dealing drugs to her classmates through a supplier called Howie Bowers. She had been sleeping with Elliot Ward, the history teacher and father of Pip's best friend Cara. Max Hastings had spent years drugging and assaulting girls at parties, and Andie had been supplying what he used.

Someone left notes telling Pip to stop. Then they killed her dog.

The truth came in two halves. Elliot Ward had shoved Andie during a struggle, believed he had killed her, and so drove out to Sal, murdered him and staged the confession to close the case. He had also taken a girl who resembled Andie and kept her locked in a house for five years, telling her that was who she was. But Andie had made it home alive that night, and her sister Becca, whom Andie had knowingly let Max drug and rape, pushed her in a rage. Andie choked to death on the floor and Becca put her body in a septic tank.

Becca tried to strangle Pip in her own kitchen and Ravi pulled her off. Becca and Elliot Ward were both arrested, Sal was cleared at last, and Max Hastings was charged.

Pip had sworn off cases. Then Connor Reynolds asked her to find his brother Jamie, who had walked out of Sal and Andie's memorial and never come home, and the police would not treat a grown man as missing. She started a second season of her podcast instead.

Jamie had been catfished. A woman calling herself Layla Mead had been talking to half the men in Little Kilton, and she did not exist. What Layla wanted was Child Brunswick, the name the papers had given a boy who testified against his own father, a serial killer, and who had been released years later under a new identity into an ordinary town.

Pip worked out that Child Brunswick was Stanley Forbes, the quiet man who wrote for the local paper, and used Layla's account to draw him to an abandoned farmhouse. She was right about him and wrong about everything else. Charlie Green, her own neighbour, walked in with a gun. Layla had been Charlie and his wife Flora all along, hunting the man they held responsible for a brother murdered years before. Charlie shot Stanley, set the farmhouse alight and left. Pip dragged him out and he died in the field, and the man the town had despised turned out to have been a child who did the right thing.

Jamie was alive, locked in Stanley's bathroom and put there for his own safety. Charlie and Flora ran.

Then Max Hastings took the stand, blamed the assaults on a dead Sal Singh, and the jury acquitted him. Pip put her recording of Max on the podcast, threw a rock through his window and painted what he was on his door. She stopped believing the system would do it for her.

Someone had been leaving chalk figures and dead pigeons for Pip, and the pattern matched the Duct Tape Killer, who had murdered five women in the area years earlier. That case was closed. Billy Karras had confessed and gone to prison for it. Pip, running on pills and no sleep and no remaining faith in the courts after Max Hastings walked free, worked out that Karras was innocent and that the real killer had simply stopped six years ago.

He stopped when Andie Bell died. The Duct Tape Killer was Jason Bell, Andie's father, and he had stopped because his own daughter had worked out what he was.

Jason took Pip, taped her wrists and left her in a storeroom to come back for later. When he came back she was waiting, and she killed him with a hammer.

What she did next was not self-defence. Pip and Ravi, helped by Cara, Naomi, Jamie and Connor, staged the whole scene. They manipulated the time of death, planted Max Hastings's phone and his traces in the building, burned it to destroy what was left, and built alibis for everyone involved. Max Hastings, a serial rapist a jury had already let go, was arrested for a murder he had not committed and convicted of it.

When police found Pip's headphones at Jason's house, Ravi lied to cover for her. Pip then pushed her friends away deliberately so that none of them would be looked at closely, and left Little Kilton.