Books like A Good Girl's Guide to Murder — depending on which book hooked you

Most lists of books like A Good Girl's Guide to Murder are every YA thriller with a girl on the cover. But the trilogy changes genre as it goes. The first book is a case file: Pip's project logs, interview transcripts and notes, a closed case reopened, and the chance to solve it before she does. The second, Good Girl, Bad Blood, is a race against the clock: someone goes missing, there's a podcast, and the police won't listen. The third, As Good as Dead, goes dark and doesn't come back.

So "what next?" depends on which of the three you loved. If it was the puzzle, you want an old case with clues you can follow. If it was the podcast and the clock, you want an investigation happening in real time. If it was the ending, you want a book that takes the moral weight seriously — and that shelf is smaller and heavier.

The list starts with the rest of Holly Jackson (three standalones, one of them for adults), moves on to cases you can solve, then the school-secret thrillers, and ends with the darkest one. No spoilers for the trilogy beyond the premise of each book.

For a lot of readers, Pip is their first detective. The first book teaches you to read like one — suspects, timelines, a theory you change three times — and once you have the habit, you want another book that uses it. That's why lists of books like it are so mixed: people use one title to ask for three different things.

Pip keeps logs, and it's a habit worth stealing. One line after each book — who you suspected, whether you got it, when it got too dark — quickly tells you what kind of mystery you actually like, and that's more useful than any list, this one included.