Pippa "Pip" Fitz-Amobi

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist of the A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series; hunted rather than hunter in As Good as Dead
• First appearance: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
• Key relationships: Ravi Singh; her parents and brother Josh; friends Cara Ward, Connor and Jamie Reynolds, Nat da Silva
• Antagonists: Jason Bell (DT Killer), Max Hastings; institutional adversary Detective Richard Hawkins
• Arc in this book: From traumatized survivor to vigilante who engineers justice outside the law

Who She Is

At the start of As Good as Dead, Pippa “Pip” Fitz-Amobi is a brilliant mind running on fumes—sleepless, medicated, and hollowed out by the violence she’s witnessed. She was once the student sleuth who trusted evidence and institutions; now she is a young woman who knows that the system can abandon its most vulnerable. Haunted by panic spikes and “dead eyes” in the mirror, she is no longer just solving crimes—she’s surviving them. The book reframes Pip from idealist to realist, as the themes of Trauma and Its Aftermath and The Nature of Good and Evil compress her into a version of justice the law won’t touch.

Personality & Traits

Pip’s defining qualities are still sharp focus and moral seriousness—but both are scorched by trauma. The instincts that once made her an excellent investigator become survival tools, and then weapons. Her refusal to be gaslit by powerful men is courageous; her decision to weaponize that courage outside the law is catastrophic, and deliberate.

• Traumatized, hypervigilant: Everyday sounds become gunshots; reflections show “dead eyes.” Her body is a barometer of panic—shaking hands she imagines bloodied, a “fight-or-flight” heart, and bone-deep exhaustion.
• Determined to the point of compulsion: She keeps a meticulous spreadsheet of her stalker, insists on a “clean” Jane Doe case to “fix” herself, and later channels that meticulousness into planning a perfect cover-up.
• Secretive and isolated: She hides her Xanax use from her family and from Ravi, convinced her darkness is hers alone to contain—protective instinct curdled into distance.
• Volatile, rage-prone: Her fury at Max Hastings flares into violent fantasies and an incendiary mediation, signaling the pressure building beneath her self-control.
• Morally transgressive: Betrayed by a broken system, she embraces vigilante calculus—killing Jason Bell and framing Max Hastings as an act of “greater” justice, knowing precisely which lines she’s erasing.

Character Journey

Pip begins already diminished, hoping that solving a clear-cut case (a Jane Doe investigation) might restore her equilibrium. Instead, a stalker drags her into a personal war she cannot outsource to the police—especially not to Detective Richard Hawkins, whose indifference confirms her worst suspicions. Following the threats leads her to the truth: the DT Killer is Jason Bell. Her abduction becomes the crucible of her arc. She survives by intelligence and grit, but her most defining choice comes after: rather than run to safety, she returns and kills Jason. That decision is her irreversible Loss of Innocence. From there, she engineers a morally precise and ethically abhorrent frame job against Max Hastings, weaponizing the very skills that once liberated truth to fabricate it. The cost is everything: trust, love, community, and the version of herself that believed justice and the law could still be neighbors.

Key Relationships

• Ravi Singh: Ravi is the steady counterweight to Pip’s spiral—“the antidote” she both needs and pushes away. His belief in her is unwavering, and his choice to help with the cover-up becomes the story’s most intimate expression of Love, Loyalty, and Sacrifice. Their final goodbye is love reimagined as protection, proving the depth of their bond by breaking it.
• Her family: With her parents and Josh, Pip performs “fine,” a brittle pantomime that fails the closer they look. Their worry underscores the collateral damage of her trauma—and how secrecy isolates her from the very people who might have saved her softer self.
• Cara Ward; Connor and Jamie Reynolds; Nat da Silva: The friends function as a last-ditch community of trust. Their willingness to help frame Max—without demanding full confession—testifies to Pip’s influence and to the story’s unsettling thesis: that love can be bent to justify terrible deeds.
• Jason Bell: As the DT Killer and her stalker, Jason is not only the antagonist but the final exam of Pip’s ethics. Killing him is both self-defense and a line-crossing she chooses to make permanent.
• Max Hastings: Max is an embodiment of impunity—a man the system refuses to hold accountable. Framing him translates Pip’s moral injury into action: if the law won’t deliver justice, she will force an outcome and accept the stain.
• Andie Bell: Andie becomes Pip’s ghostly mirror. Learning that Andie knew about her father and died trying to escape him binds them in shared entrapment: two girls cornered by the same predator, separated by time but joined by fear and defiance.

Defining Moments

Pip’s story pivots on scenes where institutions fail and she decides to be the institution.

• The mediation with Max Hastings: Pip refuses to be silenced or sanitized, exposing the chasm between victim-truth and public palatability. It anchors the theme of Justice and the Flawed Legal System.
• Reporting the stalker to Hawkins: Dismissed and minimized, she internalizes the lesson that authority won’t protect her—permission, in her mind, to protect herself by any means.
• Abduction and escape: Bound and left to die by Jason Bell, she survives through focus and method. The escape affirms her resilience; its aftermath reveals what survival has already cost.
• The murder of Jason Bell: Returning with a hammer is the hinge of the book. It’s a grim act of agency that transforms Pip from investigator to executioner by choice, not accident.
• The goodbye with Ravi: Choosing distance to keep him safe is the story’s emotional crescendo—love reframed as absence, hope traded for plausible deniability.

Essential Quotes

Dead-eyed. That’s what they said, wasn’t it? Lifeless, glassy, empty. Dead eyes were a constant companion now, following her around, never more than a blink away. [...] And sometimes in the mirror too, wearing her own face.

This image externalizes Pip’s PTSD: her reflection has become a stranger she can’t comfort or control. It frames the book’s opening mood—self-recognition curdled into dread—and foreshadows choices made by someone who no longer recognizes “good girl” as a category she fits.

"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."

Pip refuses institutional decorum that protects predators at the expense of victims. The line captures her adamant relationship to truth—and the rage that will later push her to manufacture it when the system refuses to hold men like Max accountable.

He was right, Charlie Green. And I hope you never find him. [...] "Oh, and," she cut him off, her fingers gripping the handle too hard, like she might just bend the metal, leave her prints in it forever, "do me a favor. If I disappear, don’t look for me. Don’t even bother."

Invoking Charlie reframes flight as a rational response to injustice, not guilt. Telling them not to look for her forecasts both her abduction and her philosophical break: she no longer expects—or wants—rescue from institutions that have already failed her.

"You’re lucky I didn’t put you in the ground too."

This brutal line exposes the scorched-earth edge to Pip’s new ethics. It’s not a slip; it’s a worldview in a sentence—harm as a proportional answer to harm, and a warning that she now carries violence as readily as evidence.

"I’m a ticking time bomb, Ravi. I can’t have the people I love near me when it goes off. Especially not you."

Pip names the paradox at the heart of her relationship: love as hazard. Her self-exile reads as both protection and punishment, showing how trauma recodes intimacy into risk and leaves sacrifice as the only love she trusts.