A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson was released in 2019 and follows a teenage girl as she investigates a local murder/disappearance that happened 5 years ago.
Andie Bell disappeared and, although her body was never found, everyone is sure that her boyfriend, Sal Singh, is responsible.
I’m asked the same questions all the time: What actually happened to Andie Bell? Where was Andie Bell’s body? Who killed Andie Bell? What happened to Sal Singh? Did Sal Singh kill Andie Bell?
This post will include full spoilers about what happened to Andie Bell and the events leading up to it.
If you haven’t read the entire series (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Good Girl Bad Blood, and As Good As Dead) and don’t want spoilers then do not continue reading.
Andie Bell was a teenage girl who was dating Sal Singh. Sal was expecting to get into a top university and was being helped with his application by his history teacher, Elliot Ward.
Andie lives with her parents and her sister and doesn’t have the best home life. Andie’s father, Jason Bell, spends his time saying horrible things about his daughters and pitting them against each other.
Andie begins having an affair with Elliot Ward and uses this to attempt to blackmail him into helping her get into the same university as Sal because she desperately wants to get away from her dad. From the first book in the series, we assume that this is just because her dad treats her horribly. However, in As Good As Dead, we find out that Andie knew something about her dad that terrified her. She’d recently begun to suspect he was a serial killer operating in a nearby town after seeing him with one of the victims. She desperately wanted to get away from him and was planning on bringing her sister with her.
In a desperate attempt to get Elliot to help her get into a university away from home, Andie goes to his house and tries to blackmail him. While there she tells Elliot that the only reason she slept with him was to manipulate him and then attempts to destroy some of the paintings his late wife had made. When Elliot tried to stop her, he pushed her away and she hit her head on a desk. When Elliot left to find a first-aid kit, Andie disappeared.
She’d actually walked home where she met her sister, Becca. Becca had recently been drugged and raped at a party and she’d just found out that it was actually Andie that had sold the drugs that had been used to drug her. She confronted Andie about this and Andie told her that she didn’t care. They got into a fight and Becca pushed Andie, causing Andie to fall and die choking on her own vomit due to the head injury that she already had. Thinking that she’d killed her sister, Becca took her body and hid it in the septic tank in an old house.
Elliot Ward assumed he had killed Andie, so he killed her boyfriend, Sal Singh, and framed him for the murder. He took him out to the woods, forced him to take sleeping pills and put a bag over his head before using Sal’s phone to send a confession text to his dad.
Elliot began to get worried when Andie’s body didn’t show up since if she reappeared then the story of Sal killing himself because of guilt would be questioned. One day, he was driving down a road when he saw a girl he assumed was Andie. This girl looked dirty and drugged up and he kidnapped her and kept her hidden in the attic in his old house for 5 years.
This girl turned out to be a mentally disabled young woman from an abusive household and he had convinced her she was, in fact, Andie Bell.
For 5 years, he got away with murder and kidnapping.
That is until Pippa Fitz-Amobi decided to investigate the crime for a school project.
