Note: There are spoilers for all six episodes of “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” in the article below.
There’s a lot to unpack in that “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” ending. BBC’s adaptation of the best-selling Holly Jackson book, which Netflix debuted internationally on Aug. 1, is full of twists and turns, and more overlapping crimes than you might expect from YA murder mystery.
“Wednesday” breakout Emma Myers stars as Pip, a teen sleuth who cracks open a five-year-old murder case, determined to prove that an innocent man took the blame. And that determination gets Pip tangled up in more crimes than you would believe, from a hit-and-run cover-up to kidnapping — and ultimately, yes, an answer at last to what really happened to Andie Bell.
It’s a lot of overlapping misdeeds, and you might feel like you need Pip’s murder board to untangle them all, so we’ve got you covered with a handy guide to unpacking the “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” ending and just who did what.
Who Killed Andie Bell?
Well, like a lot of good mysteries, that doesn’t really have a one-person answer. There were two main culprits behind Andie’s (India Lillie Davis) death — her teacher and former lover Elliot Ward (Mathew Baynton) and her sister Becca (Carla Woodcock), who both played an individual role in her tragic demise.
Let’s break it down. As for Elliot, Pip’s English teacher and best friend’s father was the “secret older guy” Andie was having an affair with that she learned about early in her investigation. Pip puts the pieces together when she gets a call from Naomi (Yasmin Al-Khudhairi) on his old phone and recognizes the number. When she confronts him with the truth, he reveals that he had a relationship with Andie when she was his 17-year-old student.
After Andie’s father took away the money she had saved to run away from home, she tried to blackmail Elliot, threatening to tell everyone about their relationship if he didn’t give her 5,000 pounds. He didn’t take that well. They got into a fight and when Elliot pushed her, she fell, hit her head on the counter and wandered off. That’s what we see in the opening scene of the series. Elliot says he went to call an ambulance, but when he came back, she’d already left.
Where did she go? That brings us to Becca, who already had some pent-up rage against her sister. Pip’s investigation uncovered that Becca was drugged and raped by Max Hastings (Henry Ashton). What she didn’t know, however, was that Becca told Andie afterward and Andie refused to come forward because she was the one who sold Max the drugs he used to do it.
Back to the night of Andie’s death. Naturally, after her blowout with Elliot, Andie wandered home, where she met up with her younger sister. Andie told her she was planning to leave town with Sal and Becca lashed out, panicking about being left alone with their father. She pushed Andie, and when her sister — who had already sustained a serious head wound — smacked into the wall, she collapsed to the ground and started throwing up. Becca, stunned and angry, stood by and watched as her sister choked to death on her own vomit. “It was awful,” she recalls to Pip as she confesses all.
But she must not feel that bad about it, because she was more than willing to kill again. Becca leads Pip to the site of Andie’s body, where Pip realizes too late that she’s been drugged, and Becca tries to throw her down in the hiding spot with her sister’s corpse. Fortunately, Ravi (Zain Iqbal) and Cara (Asha Banks) show up just in time to rescue her.
So, which one of the killers was sending Pip threatening messages?
Both! Pip received two types of threats during her investigation — a paper note and anonymous text messages. Turns out those were also from two different people. Elliot wanted to stop her from disclosing his relationship with Andie, as well as the fight that left her injured on the night she was last seen alive. He left the “Stop Digging, Pippa” note she found during Cara’s birthday camping trip, which makes sense since Elliot is Cara’s dad. Pip confirmed who left the message by going through the log on his home printer and cross-checking the dates.
As for the more menacing text threats, those came from Becca, who was trying to cover up her involvement in Andie’s death.
Does that mean Becca killed Pip’s dog, Barney?
Yes, Becca killed Pip’s family dog in a drastic measure to silence her, after Pip posted a video to social media promising she was going to reveal everything she found during her investigation into Andie’s murder.
Who killed Sal?
Sal Singh, Andie’s boyfriend and Ravi’s brother, seemingly confessed to Andi’s murder and killed himself. However, Ravi never believed it because the confession text from his brother had perfect grammar. Like something an English teacher might send. Which is exactly what happened.
Elliot assumed Andie died as a result of the head injury from their fight and went to work finding someone to take the fall. That led him to Sal, who Elliot drugged and suffocated, sending the false confession from his phone to make it look like a suicide. So, though Elliot didn’t intentionally kill Andie, he was indeed a murderer … and a kidnapper.
What’s up with the girl in Elliot’s attic?
When Pip starts to put the pieces together about Elliot, she follows him to his family’s old home, where she confronts him. He tells her the story of his fight with Andie and almost gets her out the door, even with a little sympathy, when she hears someone through the pipes and rushes up to the attic. She finds a young blonde woman, who she first mistakenly thinks is Andie.
As the woman, Isla (Georgia Lock), tells her, Elliot made that same mistake one night when he saw her on the street. She tells Pip that she was going through a rough time, so she went back home with Elliot, where they talked and had drinks. After he drunkenly stumbled into a confession about killing Sal, he locked her in his attic so she couldn’t tell the police.
Naturally, he also locks Pip in the attic as soon as she’s up there — but fortunately, she already told Ravi to send the police before she arrived.
How does the hit-and-run connect to all of this?
The hit-and-run and subsequent blackmail are essential to the case because they robbed Sal Singh of an alibi. And who did the blackmailing? Once again, that would be Elliot Ward, who blackmailed his own daughter.
In fact, it’s a little bit of a blackmail “Inception” — blackmail stacked on blackmail — so let’s untangle it.
First things first, Naomi and Max participated in a hit-and-run that almost killed a man, but they got away free and clear. Why? Because Max was blackmailing an officer, Dan Da Silva (Jackson Bews), who hooked up with Andie years earlier when she was still a minor. After the hit-and-run, Max called Officer Da Silva and forced him to help them cover up their involvement in the car accident.
Elliot learned all this when he read Naomi’s diary. Again, believing that Andie died after hitting her head during their fight, Elliot used that information to frame Sal. He blackmailed Naomi and Max into lying about the alibi that would have cleared Sal of Andie’s murder.
Naomi comes clean about this to Pip when she points her to one of Max’s social media accounts. There, Pip finds an old photo from the night of Andie’s death that proves Sal was still hanging out with his friends at 12:06 in the morning, well after they both claimed he had left early.
What happens to Max Hastings?
For now, nothing. Just as Becca warned, nothing happens to guys like him. That is, until Pip finds a way to get to him. In the closing minutes, Pip confronts Max about raping Becca, promising that she’s not going to stop until every person he’s ever hurt gets justice.
So, is there more to the story?
Yes and no. There’s no word on a second season yet, but “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” is just the first in a trilogy of Jackson’s books. Next up would be “Good Girl, Bad Blood,” followed by “As Good As Dead” if the series gets renewed and follows the books.
“As ever with TV, it very much depends on turnout for season 1,” Jackson told RadioTimes. “If there’s enough of an appetite for it. We’re all very much hoping and praying.”