Max Hastings

Quick Facts

• Role: Primary antagonist; the living flaw line in the town’s justice
• First major appearance: Central force in As Good as Dead (following his off-page acquittal for serial sexual assaults in the previous book)
• Key relationships: Pippa "Pip" Fitz-Amobi, Jason Bell, Andie Bell and Becca Bell, attorney Christopher Epps

Who They Are

Max Hastings is the series’ unrepentant predator turned brazen bully—the man who proves that the system can be gamed. After being acquitted, he returns not chastened but energized, using a libel suit to punish Pip for naming his crimes. He’s less a character who evolves than a force that entrenches, a figure who embodies the novel’s indictment of the Justice and the Flawed Legal System. For Pip, Max becomes a fixed point of moral certainty—“black-and-white, clear-cut”—whose very freedom pushes her beyond the boundaries of lawful justice.

Personality & Traits

Max’s power lies in entitlement weaponized: he radiates the self-belief that rules don’t apply to him, and he’s adept at performing innocence when it serves him. He disdains accountability, treats the law as a tool rather than a standard, and cloaks malice in calm, professional politeness. Even his props—a dark-blue running water bottle—become a quiet taunt, a reminder that he moves unbothered through a world that keeps letting him.

• Arrogant and entitled: Post-acquittal, he behaves as if owed a pristine future and top-tier career, framing Pip’s public accusations as obstacles to his “deserved” success rather than consequences of his actions.
• Vindictive and cruel: He doesn’t move on; he retaliates. The libel suit exists to hurt Pip. In mediation, a “hint of something dark and gloating” in his eyes makes clear he enjoys her distress.
• Manipulative: He denies the authenticity of his recorded confession with practiced ease—“It’s clearly doctored… I don’t even sound like that”—performing reasonableness to reframe evidence as deceit.
• Remorseless: He treats victims and their families as inconveniences. When confronted in a café by Jason Bell, he reaches not for remorse but for legal threat (“I’ll call my lawyer”), flaunting the protection money can buy.
• Performative civility: He sits neatly, speaks calmly, and sips from that dark-blue bottle—gestures that project control and normalcy while masking predation.

Character Journey

Max does not grow; he concentrates. His acquittal hardens him from covert offender to overt aggressor—suing, smirking, and daring anyone to try to hold him accountable. That escalation breaks the final restraints on Pip, whose moral calculus shifts from evidence-gathering to evidence-planting. He becomes the perfect vessel for Pip’s most radical act: framing him for Jason Bell’s murder. In narrative terms, Max’s “arc” is a negative constant that catalyzes change in others; his unchanging evil sharpens Pip’s tragic transformation and completes her Loss of Innocence.

Key Relationships

• Pip Fitz-Amobi: Their dynamic is pure antagonism. He represents impunity made flesh; she represents truth without power. His lawsuit and gloating composure compound her Trauma and Its Aftermath, and his dismissal of her as “psycho” blinds him to how far she will go.

• Jason Bell: Jason’s visceral hatred for Max stems from Max’s history with Jason’s daughters. Their café altercation—ending with Jason spilling coffee and Max threatening legal action—creates public “bad blood” that later provides the motive Pip needs to plausibly frame Max for Jason’s murder.

• Andie Bell and Becca Bell: Max was Andie’s customer for Rohypnol and used the drug to rape her younger sister, Becca—acts that help set off the series’ original tragedy. This history anchors Max as the root system beneath multiple storylines of harm.

• Christopher Epps: As Max’s lawyer, Epps is the mechanism of Max’s immunity—first securing his acquittal, then fronting the libel suit. Through Epps, Max’s privilege converts into legal protection and intimidation.

Defining Moments

The arc of As Good as Dead turns on Max’s brazenness and the opportunities it creates for Pip’s darkest choices.

• The mediation meeting: Max’s smug calm, sustained by his lawyer’s demand for a public apology and retraction, crystallizes the book’s central conflict.

  • Why it matters: His taunting composure (those deliberate sips from the dark-blue bottle) pushes Pip from righteous anger into a plan for extralegal justice.

• The café confrontation with Jason Bell (as recounted by Cara Ward): A public quarrel ends with Jason dumping coffee and Max threatening his lawyer.

  • Why it matters: The scene provides a credible narrative of “motive” and animosity that Pip later exploits to make Max the obvious suspect.

• The framing: Unconscious and unaware, Max becomes the center of Pip and Ravi Singh’s meticulous evidence-planting—hair, shoeprints, digital traces—to tie him to Jason’s murder.

  • Why it matters: His arrest is a chilling inversion of justice: the only punishment he ever faces is for a crime he did not commit, a perverse “balance” weighted by all the crimes for which he was never punished.

Essential Quotes

She stepped into the room and his face was the first thing she saw. Sitting on the opposite side of the long table, his angular cheekbones in a downward point to his mouth, his messy swept-back blond hair. He glanced up and met her eyes, a hint of something dark and gloating in his. Max Hastings.

This physical sketch doubles as moral portraiture. The sharp, angular features and “gloating” look establish Max’s weaponized poise—he is neat, handsome, and utterly pleased with his impunity, an image that needles Pip and anchors her dread.

"It’s clearly doctored," Max spoke up for the first time, maddeningly calm, folding his hands in front of him. His eyes focused only on the mediator. "I don’t even sound like that."
"What, like a rapist?" Pip spat across at him.

His calm, procedural denial versus Pip’s raw accusation encapsulates the book’s power imbalance: performance and process favor him; truth and fury belong to her. The exchange shows how Max hides behind “reasonableness” to erase evidence and reframe himself as victim.

Everything came back to Max Hastings, when you really thought about it... She could trace it all back to Max Hastings. The origin. Her cornerstone.

Calling Max “the origin” and “cornerstone” elevates him from antagonist to structural cause. He is the fixed point by which Pip measures right and wrong—and the force that bends her toward a darker definition of justice.

His gaze cut back into hers. "You’ve lost your mind," he sneered.
"Maybe. So you should be terrified."

Max’s sneer reduces Pip to instability; her reply weaponizes that judgment. The moment marks the shift where his misreading of her—dismissing her as “crazy”—becomes his vulnerability, because he cannot imagine the lengths she will go to undo him.