Pretty Girls Get Away with Murder

Murder is in the eye of the beholder and Brandi Bradley’s Pretty Girls Get Away with Murder is the perfect example of how different people can see the same events. The police are always suspicious, open to any leads, until they find the person they think is the prime suspect. This suspect has their own viewpoint. Then there is the friend, what do they have to say? Who killed Ethan? The crazed ex-girlfriend, the obsessed best friend, or someone else entirely? 

The case opens with some grainy film footage. A normal night in a sleepy town, not used to violent crime. Inside the house a body rests in the shower, violently stabbed and left for dead. Who would want Ethan dead? From various perspectives, we will jump forwards and back in time as the case unfolds. 

There are many ways to tell a procedural crime story and there are a lot of them around. In essence, Pretty is a classic whodunnit structure, but Bradley disguises it in an entertaining way. Rather than follow a linear pattern from murder to solution, the story bounces back and forth. The story structure moves on in chapters as the days tick on from the murder. Here we follow detectives D’Arnaud and Boggs as they look through evidence and question suspects. 

It is not long until two names come to the forefront in their investigation; Gabby and Jenna. Gabby is the ex-girlfriend from the wrong side of the tracks, was Ethan trying to hide their relationship? Jenna is a friend from Ethan’s college days, but she seems more than a friend, going out of her way to organise his day to day. Surely one of these two women know who the killer was? Perhaps it was one of them? 

It is here that the book takes a narrative shift. Gabby and Jenna are given the time to explain events in their own voice. Between the chapters that push the case on, we are invited into a first-person perspective of these two women. Both are flawed but feel very real. Gabby is vain and in someways guileless, Jenna is headstrong and finds it hard to listen to others. In the wrong hands these could have been badly written stereotypes of certain types of women, but Bradley handles them well. Entertainingly in fact. There are tropes here, but we also get a real understanding that they are real people and not just caricatures. 

It is the movement from police procedural to first person diary-like which really elevates the book. It reads differently and entertains. In reality, this is a pretty straight forward case, but there are twists. Bradley disguises this in the way the book was written. There are only so many ways that you can write a crime story and people enjoy the genre because they know what they are going to get. Pretty offers both the reassurance of a standard crime story, but also an interesting approach to it.