A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

“When you ask people in town what happened to Andie Bell, they’ll tell you without hesitation: ‘She was murdered by Salil Singh.’ No ‘allegedly,’ no ‘might have,’ no ‘probably,’ no ‘most likely.’ He did it, they say. Sal Singh killed Andie. But I’m just not so sure.”

The preconceived notions of the community in reference to Sal’s guilt are apparent in this quote. The accusations against him are solidified as true in seemingly everyone’s mind except Pip’s. The words also demonstrate what a difficult task Pip faces in investigating a case that appears open and shut to outsiders and even those who knew Sal.

“I’m not like an expert or anything, but they have different ways of life from us, don’t they? They don’t treat women quite like we do. So I’m guessing maybe Andie decided she didn’t want to be with him or something, and he killed her in a rage because, in his eyes, she belonged to him.”

This statement Stanley Forbes says to Pip during their interview illustrates the racism the Singh family—particularly Ravi—must deal with, being of Indian ethnicity. Sal is painted as guilty in part due to Stanley’s characterization of Sal’s values as differing from the seeming norm. Stanley has created this motivation for Sal based on this idea of values, which he wrote about as a journalist during the Bell case and disseminated to the community, exacerbating the family’s status as outsiders.

“It’s interesting to compare your reporting about Sal to your recent articles on the Stratford Strangler. He murdered five people and pleaded guilty, yet in your headline you referred to him as a ‘lovesick young man.’ Is that because he’s white?”

Here, Pip addresses Stanley Forbes, pointing out that his demonization of Sal in the press differs from the tone he used to characterize another killer who is white. Pip’s point is not only that the men are treated with a difference in tone in the press due to their skin color but also that Sal only allegedly murdered Andie. Sal was never convicted of the crime but is presumed to be guilty, whereas the Stratford Strangler referenced in the quote pled guilty but is still only referred to as a “lovesick young man.”

“It’s not just that he’s gone. It’s that…well, we’re not allowed to grieve for him, because of what happened. And if I say ‘I miss my brother,’ it makes me some kind of monster.”

Ravi struggles with Sal’s death, torn between feeling grief at his death and knowing how this looks in the community. If Ravi grieves for his brother, he appears as though he is siding with a murderer. This internal struggle is an example of the pressure public shame places on Ravi.

“Since then, he’s always been a hero to me. I just can’t believe he did it.”

Here, the reader gains key insight into Pip’s motivation for her capstone project but also what drives her as a character. She knew Sal personally and felt an emotional connection to him based on his kindness, which has led her to believe he could not have committed the crime. It is her devotion to the memory she has of Sal that results in Pip’s dogged determination to get at the truth.

“Pip watched the woman’s face as it creased, folded with recognition and disgust. The woman scanned the milk, staring at Ravi with cold, noxious eyes.”

In this scene at the grocery store in which the cashier refuses to interact with Ravi, the theme of public shame is once again made external. The cashier reacts with physical disgust and discomfort at Ravi’s presence, and this reaction causes him to leave the store. The community’s poor treatment of Ravi and the Singhs becomes increasingly apparent, illustrating the power public shame has over the family.

“So Andie was beautiful; she was popular; she was fun. Being her friend, being someone she chose to spend her time with…it made you feel special. Wanted. And then she would flip and use the things you were most self-conscious about to cut you down and hurt you. And still we both remained by her side, waiting for the next time she would pick us up and make us feel good again. She could be amazing and awful, and you never knew which side of Andie was turning up at your door. I’m surprised my self-esteem even survived.”

This statement Emma Hutton gives to Pip during their interview gives the reader key insight into Andie Bell as a character, something that is slowly revealed through secondhand accounts from those who knew her. The Andie those closest to her knew is shown to have had a darker side. The toll she inflicted on those around her—and thus motivations for her murder—becomes clearer in this passage.

“Was this the real Andie Bell, hidden behind that perfect smile, behind those sparkling pale blue eyes? Everyone in her orbit so dazzled by her, so blinded, that they hadn’t even noticed a darkness that might’ve lurked beneath—not until it was too late.”

Andie’s status as a beautiful and popular girl is illustrated here. However, rather than the picture-perfect girl she appeared to be to an outsider, Andie begins to take shape as a much darker person than she seemed. Additionally, Pip theorizes that this darkness could have been a motivation for someone to murder her based on the tangled web emerging about Andie’s true self.

“Stop digging, Pippa.”

This is the first threatening note Pip receives, which appears in her sleeping bag while she is camping. It represents the first sign that what Pip is doing is potentially dangerous. The note also serves to signify to Pip that someone is watching her as she undertakes her investigation—an intriguing clue about a third party being connected to the case.

“It crossed her mind that maybe she had gone too far this time for an assignment. Maybe. But this wasn’t just a project anymore. This was for Sal, for Ravi. For the truth. She could do this for them.”

Pip has gone undercover for her project and is pretending to smoke marijuana with another student named Stephen in this scene. She is quite uncomfortable, is being deceptive, and eventually ends up in a dangerous situation when Stephen becomes increasingly interested in her and she must flee him. Pip clearly begins to confront the question of the lengths she is willing to go to for the truth and for the sake of Sal and Ravi.

“The lying gets easier the more I have to do it.”

Here, Pip expresses how the deception and manipulation she enacts are increasing in frequency and intensity. This reflection allows the theme of identity to emerge as Pip wonders what she will do to discover the truth. Whether Pip is bending her moral compass in her quest to get to the bottom of things is questioned, eventually causing her to wonder whether her choices are right or wrong.

“Fear started to uncurl in her stomach, driven by one thought: Andie Bell went out in the dark on her own, and she never came back.”

This quote highlights the danger Pip faces when she decides to follow Howie Bowers into the darkness of the night to see where he goes. Thus, whether what she is doing goes too far for the case by putting her safety at risk is again brought to mind. Pip reflects on Andie having lost her life and knows this is a potential fate she could face through her investigation.

“It’s the personal essay I’m worried about; I’ve read through the prompts, but I have no idea what to say. The school counselor says to just be yourself. But how am I supposed to explain exactly who I am when I don’t actually know? I’m good at homework, I guess, and I’m motivated. But is that what makes me me?”

This is where Pip’s identity search is made explicit as she attempts to write her college application personal essay. She continues to struggle to write this throughout the novel, demonstrating her inability to see and explain her characteristics and motivations clearly to herself. The passage is indicative of an ongoing theme of Pip attempting to put together something that reflects who she really is while that person remains elusive.

“You’re asking me, the brother of the person everyone thinks murdered Andie Bell, to break into the Bell house? Not to mention the amount of trouble I’d be in anyway as a brown guy breaking into a white family’s house.”

Pip has asked Ravi to break into the Bell house to attempt to locate Andie’s second burner phone. This quote illustrates that although Pip has not considered the full consequences of asking Ravi to do this task, her willingness to put herself and Ravi at risk has increased to the point of committing breaking and entering. The quote also embodies the pressure of public shame Ravi experiences as he considers the ramifications of being both an accused murderer’s brother and someone of Indian ethnicity who is breaking into the deceased girl’s house.

“Pip knew her too well, and she hated that she was doing this, manipulating her. When did she become this person?”

This narration occurs when Pip deceives Cara about her motivations for gaining access to Naomi’s Facebook profile, which Cara grants. She acknowledges that she knows Cara well enough to understand how to manipulate her into getting what she needs from her. Pip questions the identity she thought she had in the face of the actions she is carrying out.

“Was it wrong of me to ask Ravi to do this, to wait when he’s waited so long already? I’m torn, between the Wards and the Singhs and what’s right. I don’t even know what’s right anymore—everything is so muddled. I’m not sure I’m the good girl I once thought I was. I’ve lost her along the way.”

This passage highlights the internal conflict Pip faces of knowing what the right and wrong decisions are as she faces certain moral dilemmas. Here, she must decide between bringing the photographic evidence proving Sal’s innocence to the police and protecting Naomi from legal trouble due to her involvement in the hit-and-run. The choice Pip faces this time explicitly deals with her identity issues as she wonders whether she is the “good girl” she once believed herself to be.

“What if this was her fault? What if this was because she’d ignored her final warning? What if Barney wasn’t just lost; what if he’d been taken.”

When Pip ignores another threatening note, her dog, Barney, goes missing, and she begins to suspect that he has been taken by the sender of the notes. The limits Pip has been willing to push and the boundaries she has crossed in the name of her investigation do result in Barney being taken from her, meaning the risk she faces is real. Pip has put the safety of her beloved dog in peril, causing her to wonder again if she has gone too far for the case.

“And then she noticed their eyes, dark and glaring, fixed on a point past Pip’s shoulder, where Ravi stood. Two of the women drew together, staring at him as they muttered small, unheard things behind their hands.”

This treatment of Ravi helps demonstrate the more subtle way public shame takes its toll on him. The community has targeted Ravi as a source of their muttered gossip. This point reveals the more implicit pressure Ravi faces through his association with Sal as the accused.

“What’s wrong with me? she wrote. I might seem like the ideal student: homework always in early, every extra credit and extracurricular I can get my hands on, the good girl and the high achiever. But I realized something just now: it’s not ambition, not entirely. It’s fear. Because I don’t know who I am when I’m not working, when I’m not focused on or totally consumed by a task. Who am I between the projects and the assignments, when there’s nothing to do? I haven’t found her yet and it scares me. Maybe that’s why, for my senior capstone project this year, I decided to solve a murder.”

Pip’s identity search culminates in this final passage from her college application personal essay. In it, she still does not admit to having determined who she is but instead uses the opportunity to confess that she is still figuring this out. She does know that she applies herself determinedly to whatever task she tackles and that this is why she has decided to investigate the Bell case for her project.

“And just like that, with crushed flowers and a rotation of hugs, the Singhs took away the suffocating and confused sadness that had taken over the house. They’d opened the door and let out the ghost, for at least a little. Because there was one happy ending in all of this: Sal was innocent. His family set free from the weight they’d carried all these years. And that was worth hanging on to.”

When Ravi brings his parents to meet Pip and her family. Ravi’s parents thank Pip for all she has done for their family and for Sal, and the two families embrace one another. The words illustrate the relief the Singh family feels at the dismissal of the accusations aimed at Sal, and this final realization of freedom means liberation from the public shame that has plagued the family since Sal’s involvement in the case five years prior.

“I wish someone like you had been there for me […] All I had was Andie. She was my only escape from my dad. She was my only hope after Max. And she didn’t care. Maybe she never had. Now I’m stuck in this thing and there’s no way out except this. I don’t want to do this. I’m sorry.”

Becca Bell utters this speech to Pip as she attempts to kill her after Pip discovers that Becca killed Andie. The passage helps reveal the motivations behind Becca’s character and her decision to end her sister’s life. Having faced her father’s criticism growing up and the rape committed by Max Hastings, Becca is then abandoned by her only hope—Andie—and this drives her to commit a desperate crime.

“And yet, when we look closer, behind this true Andie, we find a girl who was vulnerable and self-conscious. Andie grew up being taught by her father that the only value she had was in the way she looked and how strongly she was desired. Home for her was a place where she was criticized and belittled. Andie never got the chance to become the young woman she might have been away from that house, to decide for herself what made her valuable and what future she wanted.”

As Andie’s secrets are revealed throughout the novel, she comes to be seen as somewhat of a cruel, bullying, and two-faced character. Here, Pip makes the important point during her capstone presentation that making harsh judgments about Andie based on these behaviors is too simple because Andie was a product of the influences that shaped her. As Pip indicates, no one knows who Andie would have turned out to be when free of those toxic influences.

“And though this story does its monsters, I’ve found that it is not one that can be so easily divided into the good and the bad. In the end this was a story about people and their different shades of desperation, crashing up against each other. But there was one person who was good until the very end. And his name was Sal Singh.”

Pip evaluates the tangled web of characters who are all interconnectedly involved in the Bell case during her capstone presentation. She makes the insightful observation that categorizing these players into good and bad people is too much of a simplification considering the various motivations each character has had in the role they have played. Pip excludes Sal Singh from these key figures, sure to note to the audience that he was the only one who was accused of a crime but was innocent from the beginning.