Holly Jackson

Holly Jackson was born in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1992. She attended a girls' grammar school in Little Chalfont and read literary linguistics and creative writing at the University of Nottingham, graduating with a first before adding a master's in English. She wrote her first novel at 15. She lives in London and has been married since 2023.

Her published debut came in 2019 with A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. Pip Fitz-Amobi, a final-year student, picks a school project on a case her town considers closed: the death of a girl five years earlier, pinned on the girl's boyfriend. The book cuts between narration and interview transcripts, notes and maps, as if the reader were flipping through Pip's case file. In 2020 it won Children's Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

The trilogy continued with Good Girl, Bad Blood (2020) and As Good as Dead (2021), plus the prequel novella Kill Joy (2021). In 2024 the story became a BBC series, streamed by Netflix outside the UK, with Emma Myers as Pip. Before that, the first book had made Barnes & Noble's best-of-the-year list in 2020, and the American Library Association picked its audiobook as one of 2021's Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults.

Next came standalone thrillers. Five Survive (2022) traps six friends in an RV on an empty road, in the sights of a sniper. The Reappearance of Rachel Price (2024) follows a girl whose mother vanished sixteen years earlier and turns up just as a documentary about the case is being filmed.

Not Quite Dead Yet (2025) was her adult suspense debut. Attacked on Halloween night, Jet Mason learns she has a week to live and spends it hunting down whoever did it. The book won the Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery & Thriller. A year earlier, The Times had already named her Britain's bestselling female crime writer.