One needn’t have read Holly Jackson’s novel of the same name to immediately identify exactly what Netflix‘s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is up to. The six-part series fits squarely into a well-trod, but deservedly beloved tradition of mysteries about meddling teenage gumshoes, with traces of everything from Nancy Drew to Harriet the Spy to Veronica Mars, if you’re looking for American antecedents. Or, with its small village British setting, maybe it’s more Miss Teen Marple? 

Adapted by Poppy Cogan and directed with solid, tone-blending balance by Dolly Wells and Tom Vaughan, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is too familiar and too rushed, especially toward its final episode, to get anywhere near the pinnacle of the prolific genre. But on its modest level it works well. Its core mystery zigzags decently, spiked by moments of real suspense and elevated by Emma Myers, making the Netflix leap from Wednesday’s werewolf roommate to full-fledged star with ease.

Myers plays Pippa Fitz-Amobi, a 17-year-old resident of bucolic Little Kilton. Pippa has loving parents (Anna Maxwell Martin and Gary Beadle), a core group of friends led by bestie Cara (Asha Banks) and she’s one year away from heading off to Cambridge for uni. Everything is neatly in order.

For her EPQ — Extended Project Qualification, basically a senior project — Pippa casts aside her plans for an essay on feminism in the gothic novel to do something more controversial.

For five years, Pippa has fixated on the disappearance of local teen Andie (India Lillie Davies). It’s been widely assumed that Andie’s boyfriend Sal Singh (Rahul Pattni) killed her and killed himself. He even confessed! But Pippa has never been convinced and she decides to make solving the crime into her school project, going so far as to turn her bedroom wall into one of those TV murder boards with lines connecting various suspects and timelines.

Naturally, not everybody in Little Kilton is pleased. Cara’s sister Naomi (Yasmin Al-Khudhairi) was one of Andie’s best friends and she knows secrets, as do Andie’s other friends including chilly rich kid Max (Henry Ashton), who isn’t Logan Echolls, but he isn’t exactly not Logan Echolls. More eager to help is Sal’s younger brother Ravi (Zain Iqbal), who sees an opportunity to clear the family name.

Soon, Pippa is getting close enough to the truth that she’s receiving threatening texts and notes and the people she loves might be in jeopardy.

Like the best protagonists in this genre, Pippa Fitz-Amobi isn’t always the most appealing of characters. She’s a meddler and a prototypical narcissist, thinking only in terms of her own fixation on the Andie mystery without giving any consideration to the communal wounds she might be exposing. She’s a “good girl,” but she’s judgmental and hurts others’ feelings. And like most 17-year-olds, Pippa isn’t always the most trained of detectives. She misinterprets data, questions suspects without strategy and keeps breaking into places she definitely doesn’t belong, contributing to the show’s most palpable set pieces. 

A platter-eyed ingenue without guile, Myers perfectly captures a young woman who finds herself unprepared for heightened emotions she’s only read about in books (she’s introduced reading Jane Eyre, which isn’t a coincidence). Whether it’s terror or sadness or the first buddings of romance or the kind of investigative posturing she must have seen in a movie — the first three, Wells-directed, episodes lean more toward humor — Pippa wears her feelings on her surface and Myers makes them feel real, however contrived the plot.

Although Myers is 22 (and not British), she comes across as natural and unaffected, aided by one of the most believable wardrobes of patched-up jeans, baggy sweaters and boxy trainers I’ve ever seen for a teenage nerd.

That she’s playing 17, but reads as slightly younger, points to some of the show’s minor demographic confusion. It’s mostly suited for tween viewers, with tame language, limited onscreen violence and no onscreen sexuality — Pippa’s chaste flirtations with Ravi are kept vague enough to prevent questions of age-appropriateness. The show’s depiction of drug use is quaint and a literally underground rave borders on hilarious. But when the series goes dark in its closing episode, some details go very dark and mature, even if it’s still more kid-friendly than the murky twists and turns in Veronica Mars. 

Insight into teenage life in 2024 is limited to the series’ reliance on social media for every major plot point, while insight into small-town life in 2024 is close to nil, even if Little Kilton seems like a fine place to live, other than the occasional homicides. More nuance and definitely more characterization — Pippa’s non-Cara friends and several key adults lack even a single dimension — could have been woven into the first five episodes, which string out a fairly obvious “twist” for far too long, leading up to a finale in which one or two reveals are nonsensical.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder didn’t exactly keep me guessing, but it kept me generally entertained across the six episodes, all under 48 minutes. Jackson has several additional “Good Girl” novels and, assuming it’s going to take two years between each Wednesday season, this is a promising start to a franchise for the promising Myers.