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***3 disappointed stars***

This review will be full of spoilers, so if you haven't read As Good As Dead and plan to do so, don't read on.
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I am in shock at how Holly Jackson managed to ruin this book for me with one simple twist. Although "simple" is not quite the right word, considering that said twist is murder.

I absolutely LOVED this series! I loved everything about it, but I especially loved Pip - how smart she is, how determined, just everything about her. At first, my heart ached for her as she felt the need to take sleeping pills, even after her doctor took her off them. In the aftermath of the events in book 2, she suffered from PTSD and couldn't sleep anymore. She also kept seeing blood on her hands, so she didn't see a better way out.

For more than half of the book, I could not put it down - it was that good.
But then something happened. Besides the main storyline, Pip gets contacted by a woman who introduces her to another case that she then takes up on. It's about a guy confessing to crimes he didn't commit, because he was coerced into false confession by the police. It was the infamous case of a serial killer who murdered 5 women some years ago. As Pip takes matters into her own hands and investigates, she starts connecting that case with her own - the stalker who's been leaving dead pigeons in front of her house and who paints headless chalk stick figures in the driveway.

Long story short, Pip finds out the identity of the actual murderer, when he manages to abduct her and plans to make her his sixth victim. She thinks she's as good as dead, but as fate would have it, she manages to escape.

Here's where my issues begin: she flees through the woods, she's FREE. But then she turns around when she hears the killer return and decides to go back TO KILL HIM. Not just "normal killing", she hits him in the head. From behind. NINE TIMES. With a hammer!! 😐 That is overkill. Not self-defense or anything. Overkill. I get that she thought no one would believe her over some respectable white guy, that he might not even have been arrested. Her word against his. I get that she was mad at this whole situation, BUT all I could think was



There are a million ways she could have gone on about this. She's Pip freaking Fitz-Amobi. She could have figured something out, for sure. And not only did she murder someone, she thinks it's a good idea to blame it on someone else. 😐😐 Yes, Max is rapist scum and deserved to go to prison. But for HIS crimes, not murder he didn't commit. For her to kill someone cold-blooded and then blame it on someone else? That is so wrong on so many levels 😐 am I the only one feeling this way? Not only does she make it look like someone else is the killer, staging false evidence and coming up with an elaborate scheme, but she gets Ravi to help her and also a few of her friends 😕 that is so fucked up... And the way they handled a dead body, even made jokes during that time... But most of all, thinking it's ok to send someone else to jail for HER crime... just baffled me.

If Pippa had PTSD from seeing up close how someone got fatally shot, how would she handle having hit a guy WITH A HAMMER!! TO THE HEAD!!? 9 TIMES!? For me, it wasn't enough that she distanced herself from her family, friends and boyfriend, only to later return when the trial was done and Max was convicted (supposing that's what happened in the end). It can't be that easy to get away with murder, even if you're a good person and the one who got killed deserved it.

I guess I just wished she would have found a smart way to out the Duct Tape Killer in her podcast. Would that have been a little of a cliché? Yes. But it would have made more sense, in my opinion. And she wouldn't have been a freaking killer herself. You see, she didn't kill the guy in self-defense, she wasn't in a situation where that would have been the only option. She turned around and decided it's best to just go kill him. It was premeditated. That makes her a murderer too, and I can't be ok with that. It's just all so messed up 🙁

OK, rant over. 😂 I probably repeated myself a bunch of times, but as stated before this is a rant 😂 sorry 🙈 To sum up, this was partly a huge disappointment and a terrible way to close off such a great series IMO.