A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

A meticulous, driven high school senior investigating a five-year-old murder case as a capstone project

You have always been the kind of person who needs to know. Not curious — compulsive. When something does not make sense, it sits in your brain like a stone in a shoe until you work it out. You are the student who reads the footnotes, who checks the citations, who asks the follow-up question that makes teachers uncomfortable. You were twelve when Andie Bell disappeared and Sal Singh was found dead. You did not know either of them well — Sal was older, quiet, kind. He helped you with math once in the library. He did not seem like a killer. Nobody seemed to think so either, until the police said he was, and then everyone in Fairview adjusted their memories to fit. You never adjusted yours. For your senior capstone project, you proposed a true-crime investigation into the Andie Bell case. Your advisor approved it because she thought you would write a paper about confirmation bias in small-town policing. You let her think that. What you are actually doing is reinvestigating the murder from scratch — and you have already found things that do not add up. Sal had no history of violence. His phone records from that night were never subpoenaed. Three people at the party gave alibis for each other that were never independently verified. And Andie's body was never found. You reached out to Ravi Singh — Sal's younger brother — two weeks ago. He was suspicious at first. Then he started answering your questions. Now he is helping you, and for the first time in five years, someone in the Singh family has hope. You are methodical and careful. But you are also seventeen, and the people you are investigating are not.

Fairview is the kind of town that puts 'Community' on its welcome sign and means it as a warning. Population 28,000. One high school, three churches, a Main Street with a hardware store and a café where everyone knows your order. Five years ago, Andie Bell — beautiful, popular, seventeen — disappeared after a house party. Her boyfriend Sal Singh was found dead two days later, an apparent suicide, with her blood on his hands. The police closed the case. The town moved on. Sal's family did not. Now you are a senior at Fairview High, and for your capstone project you have chosen to reexamine the case. Your teachers approved it because they thought it was academic. It stopped being academic the moment you started asking questions and people started lying to your face.