51 pages • 1 hour read
Holly JacksonAs Good As Dead
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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Themes
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 1-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Summary
Eighteen-year-old Pippa Fitz-Amobi (aka Pip) lives in the Connecticut town of Fairview. She produces a podcast that has helped solve several murders in her small town, but the experience has affected Pip’s mental health. She suffers frequent flashbacks to earlier murder victims and her involvement in bringing their killers to justice. One day, Pip finds a decapitated dead pigeon in her driveway as she is about to accompany her stepfather, who is a lawyer, to his office in New York. There, she will meet with attorneys trying to negotiate a settlement in a lawsuit.
Months earlier, Pip accused a local rich boy named Max Hastings of date rape and published his recorded confession on her podcast. Pip knows Max date-raped two fellow students the year before and got him to confess the crime on tape. However, when he stands trial, he is acquitted. Now, he claims that Pip has damaged his chances of getting a good job because of her slanderous accusations.
Max’s lawyer proposes to settle for $7,000 in damages, a published apology to Pip’s podcast listeners, and an admission that the recording she broadcast was false. Pip is furious and refuses the terms of the deal. She says,
I have the ultimate defense: the truth. So go on, then, file the lawsuit. I dare you. I’ll see you in court. And you know how that goes, don’t you? It will have to prove whether my statement was true, which means we get to redo your rape trial (14).
Back at home, Pip spends time with her boyfriend, Ravi. She is concerned because she will soon meet Ravi’s extended family and wants to make a good first impression. Ravi is a summer intern at a law firm and jokes that one day, his girlfriend might need a good lawyer.
Part 1, Chapters 4-7 Summary
Later that night, Pip goes to the home of a local drug dealer, Luke Eaton, who was briefly considered a suspect in her last podcast case. He sells Pip some nonprescription Xanax because she has such difficulty sleeping these days. She promises herself and Luke that this will be the last time she asks for the drugs. As she walks back home, Pip thinks she sees someone lurking in the bushes outside but dismisses this as her imagination.
The following morning, Pip is at her computer looking up information about postmortem stages of body decomposition when her mother walks in. Pip says she’s researching a Jane Doe cold case that will be the basis of her next podcast series. Mrs. Amobi is worried about her daughter’s obsession with true crime. Pip recalls her previous cases and all the moral ambiguities they contained. To straighten out her head, she believes that she needs a simple black-and-white murder to solve: “Pip could solve this case, save Jane Doe, but the most important point was that Jane Doe would save her. One more case would do it, put everything right. Just one more” (39).
As Pip leaves the house on Sunday morning, she notices figures drawn in chalk at the base of the family’s driveway. The figures are five stick people, but they are headless. She also finds a piece of duct tape stuck to a street sign, changing “Road” to “Poad.” When she reaches the café on Main Street, she intercepts Ravi approaching from the opposite direction. As they go inside, he tells her that all the relatives loved her at the previous night’s gathering. In the restaurant, the couple meets many of their friends who were involved in Pip’s previous cases. Seeing them gives Pip a feeling that not everything in Fairview is bad.
When Pip returns from her jog the following day, she notices that the five stick figures have moved up the driveway, closer to the house. Near the front door, she finds another headless dead pigeon. Her mother dismisses Pip’s concern, explaining that a neighborhood cat could have left the pigeon and the chalk figures might be tire tracks.
Up in her room, Pip checks her messages. For months, she has been receiving anonymous emails and texts that are vaguely threatening. Today, she gets an email stating, “Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Ps. remember to always kill two birds with one stone” (56). Pip is now convinced that the stick figures and the dead pigeons aren’t random accidents. Someone is stalking her.
Chapters 1-7 Analysis
The book's initial segment frequently references Pip’s previous podcast seasons. These constitute books one and two in the novel series. She recalls the victims and culprits involved in those investigations to provide context for the reader. Because the third book will draw so heavily on Pip’s previous forays into true crime, the reader needs to understand how the past will color Pip’s current case.
The story arc involving serial rapist Max Hastings spans books one and two. Even though Pip captured his confession on tape, he was still acquitted, leaving his victims and Pip enraged at this miscarriage of justice. The theme of Justice Denied is immediately foregrounded in Pip’s encounter with Max and his lawyers. After an acrimonious meeting about Max’s lawsuit for libel, Pip insists she will not apologize or say that the tape was doctored. Such demands only escalate the degree of her fury:
‘I will not retract my statement and I will not lie and say the audio file was doctored. I called him a rapist because he is a rapist. I will be dead before I ever apologize to you.’ She bared her teeth at Max, the rage curling her spine, coating her skin (14).
This encounter is important in establishing the rationale behind Pip’s vendetta against Max and the entire justice system. Her illegal actions later in the novel can more easily be understood in this light. The justice system denied justice when it acquitted Max, so Pip will find a different path to justice, one that is illegal and morally questionable.
Pip’s rage is also fueled by how others negate her words. This relates to the theme of The Struggle to Be Heard. Max’s attorneys want to suppress Max’s confession by forcing Pip to lie or face a lawsuit. The same theme is explored in unrelated scenes when Pip finds decapitated pigeons and chalk drawings in her driveway. She confides her anxiety to her mother, who dismisses these clues as irrelevant. Her father does the same. Pip’s anonymous stalker seems to be trying to suppress her voice and negate her existence too. This is apparent in messages that read, “Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?” (56). Being a podcast host may give Pip an audience to hear her, but she is being silenced and dismissed in real life.
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By Holly Jackson
