Good Girls Don’t Die follows three characters—Celia, Allie, and Maggie—who find themselves in strange situations that seem to be the sort of scenarios you would find in novels that the characters happen to be fans of. Some background around what the characters read is provided at the start of each chapter, via message board-looking posts where book genres are discussed. The book is split into four parts, with the first three sections following one of the women as she tries to figure out what is happening to her. To get too deep into the last section would be a spoiler, but it does wrap up the overall story.
The first section focuses on Celia, who becomes “aware” while making a school lunch for a child she doesn’t remember having, in a house that doesn’t feel like hers. The strangeness is compounded by the fact that she seems to be married to a man she can’t recall. In other words, she’s living a whole suburban life and has no idea how she ended up there. She knows something is wrong and is plagued by headaches whenever she thinks too hard about her situation.
Things take a turn for the worse when Celia discovers that she is the owner of a restaurant (which isn’t the bad part) that comes with a cranky next-door neighbour who has it out for her and her establishment. Then, the neighbour ends up dead… and that is the bad part.
The second section is about Allie, whose weekend girls’ trip gets crashed by her two best friends’ boyfriends Neither boyfriend is a real prize, but her friend Cam’s boyfriend is a real jerk, and is running the show. He’s got a remote cabin in the woods picked out, one that has windows that don’t lock, and has no cell reception. Fans of horror novels can see where this is going …. and Allie is a big fan of horror novels.
Then there is Maggie, a dystopian fiction fan who finds herself (along with several other women) forced into running through a maze-like structure with deadly obstacles. It is a kind of Squid Games/Hunter Games situation. The women Maggie finds herself with have all been stolen from her beds, and are being “motivated” to run through this deadly obstacle course because they are told they all have loved ones who are being held hostage and will be killed if the women don’t comply.
In each section, the women are quick to pick up that something is wrong, beyond the obvious you know murder and death and killer obstacle courses. It is not entirely clear to the women (or the readers) what is going on. I did see overall where things were going (I think the book made it pretty obvious) but I didn’t guess all the details until things got to the end. I also had a few surprises, one idea that I had had and then dismissed as things went on turned out to be right. If I got trapped in some sort of messed up “you need to solve this mystery that comes straight out of a book” scenario I don’t think I would make it to be honest.
Each section of the book is inspired by a particular book genre (a cozy mystery, horror/thriller, and then dystopian but make it adults and not teens). Starting with the cozy mystery which has just one body, then to a full-on slasher scenario, followed by a maze of death traps, with the body count increasing with each section was a bit – whiplash-inducing. I found the biggest mental jump was going from the first section to the second, yeah there is a feeling of dread that runs all through Celia’s section, but there is one body. And it’s a pretty “clean” death so to speak. Then you are in a horror novel zone and the body count and the brutality levels up.
I don’t read cozy mysteries, but I do read horror novels and have read a fair share of dystopian books, so I can say the second two sections hit all the highlights of the genre while serving the overarching narrative of the book. The first section – I think it’s a cozy mystery. I don’t know if it was just the way Celia’s story was a bit different from the others in the initial setup (she doesn’t know where she was before she lands smack into the mystery) but I liked it the best personally, and wanted to spend more time with her unravelling what was going on.
The end was a bit, not predictable but not the “twist” that the blurbs on the book cover would have had me believe it would be. Yes, there were a few things that made me go “oh, okay, didn’t see that one coming” but yeah, I didn’t feel it was a super mystery that needed unravelling.
Overall this was a fun somewhat twisty thriller, but I think i might have wanted it to focus on one character as opposed to three.