A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, review: teenage crime-solving for lovers of lightweight fiction

Need refuge from all the football? Take heart because TV drama’s favourite sport, the ever-popular game of murder, can be relied on to lift the spirits if you find the beautiful game to be deadly dull.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (BBC iPlayer), the latest in a long line of cold-case mysteries and based on Holly Jackson’s bestselling novel series, plays out as a kind of Young Adult Miss Marple as tiny but intrepid teenage detective Pip Fitz-Amobi distracts herself from Cambridge entrance tests by digging into the ghosts of a crime that haunts her sleepy home town.

Emma Myers, blessed with a cool line in perplexed frowns, makes for an appealing Pip, a character who could come off as an irksome goody two shoes given her innate inability to tell a lie. Myers musters up Pip’s inner steel, pulling us through some of the plot’s more implausible moments. Of which there are plenty. But that scarcely matters because A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is the TV equivalent of a summer page-turner, teasing you on with its next curious clue even though you know it scarcely hangs together.

You can play spin the bottle when it comes to picking your wrong ’un from the plethora of suspects lurking in the well-heeled streets of the fictional market town of Little Kilton (Axbridge in Somerset, looking dressed to make 
a property killing). Dodgy cop, creepy teacher, posh fop and more all take a turn in the villainous spotlight.

There’s a loose idea thread spun around what makes a “good” person that never quite gets beyond entry-level philosophy and the fledgling partnership of Pip and sidekick Ravi (Zain Iqbal) – bickering about who’s Holmes and who’s Watson – feels little more than a romantic box ticked.

It’s when Pip sinks her teeth into the deaths of high-school sweethearts Sal and Andie that the series exerts its grip. “You’re funny, like some hysterical avenging virgin,” observes the aforementioned posh fop when being grilled, Pip-style. The fop is also called Max Hastings and has the Instagram handle “maximum parti-boi”. Seasoned Telegraphers will get a chuckle out of that.

It’s murder-lite but with just enough grit and twists, however contrived, to keep you bingeing through its six episodes. With more stories to plunder in the novel series, this surely won’t be the last we see of the resourceful Pip Fitz-Amobi.