Pip, 17, is the sort of teenager who has never given her parents cause to worry. She doesn’t drink, seems physically incapable of telling even the whitest of lies and spends her spare time ranking Cambridge colleges based on their acceptance rates and famous alumni. In fact, it’s only the prospect of gaining some extra Ucas points that drags her into the messy business of investigating a killing in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, the BBC’s likeable, absorbing drama based on Holly Jackson’s best-selling Young Adult novel .
This must surely be the only mystery story that uses the Extended Project Qualification – essentially an add-on where A-Level students write a mini-dissertation about a chosen subject – as a plot device. Pip, played by Wednesday star Emma Myers, decides to ditch her initial idea of writing about gothic novels in favour of diving into the disappearance and presumed death of Andie Bell (Indie Lillie Davies). Andie was a popular older pupil at Pip’s school who went missing five years ago; her boyfriend Sal (Rahul Pattni) seemed to confess to her murder shortly afterwards, then died by suicide.
These two deaths still haunt the sleepy countryside town of Little Kilton – all thatched cottages and rows of pastel-painted shop fronts. Pip’s thesis is that “good guys don’t kill people”, and Sal, she believes, was very much a good guy. Soon, she turns her bedroom wall into an evidence board, covered in Instagram print-outs connected by red stri.