Jet, the 27-year-old heroine of Not Quite Dead Yet, has a choice to make: she can die now, or die in a week.
Someone attacks Jet when she returns to her family home on Halloween night. The way the blows land mean surgery has only a 10% chance of success. The alternative is an inevitable fatal aneurysm in seven days. “What kind of choice was that?” the terminally flippant Jet asks herself. “[She] couldn’t even decide what to have for breakfast most days.”
Opting to forgo the operation and take the seven days, Jet is determined to solve her own murder. She wants to prove she can persevere with something to the end; that she wasn’t “born useless and would die that way, too”, as her mother says about her when she gives up law school. That’s the set-up for Holly Jackson’s first adult novel. Her previous books have all been YA, with her first, the phenomenally successful A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, being followed by two popular sequels and turned into a BBC TV series.
Jet moves out of the family home, escaping her mother’s pleas to have the operation, and moves in with her childhood best friend, Billy. “Poor sweet Billy” has always been in love with an oblivious Jet and agrees to help her find her killer. Driving around town in Jet’s beloved powder-blue pick-up truck, their investigations lead them to suspect, among others, Jet’s brother, Jet’s brother’s wife, employees of her father’s construction company and the brother of a former boyfriend.
The police, also investigating the “murder”, are always at least one step behind, and the sense of Jet and Billy being two young people against the world while the clock ticks down is nicely done. The grimness of the time bomb in Jet’s brain is lightened by her ever-present smart-aleck humour: “Smashing shit with sledgehammers, pissing [my brother] off, being an asshole because I’m dying and allowed to be, having guns waved in our faces. I’m having fun, aren’t you?”
Despite Jet’s dire prognosis and much swearing, the novel feels more YA than adult. The grown-ups – and, tellingly, it feels accurate to characterise anyone but Jet and Billy as “the grown-ups” – tend towards caricature. The book’s setting of Woodstock, Vermont, was seemingly chosen for its proximity to the UK-based Jackson’s American publishers and, despite the prevalence of pick-up trucks and rotting Halloween pumpkins on porches, is so lightly sketched it could be an anonymous town anywhere. Jet’s major motivation for solving her own murder seems to be to show her family, especially her mother, that she can complete something hard, and this, too, feels more 17 than 27.
But Not Quite Dead Yet is enjoyable. Jackson is not an astoundingly successful author for nothing. She can do pace, twists, snarky humour and pathos with the best of them. She makes you care about the prickly, wise-cracking Jet even as Jet’s jokes get progressively more tired and self defeating: “Come on, she was the one dying, they could at least pity-laugh.” The crime is genuinely perplexing and the efforts Jet and Billy make to solve it get riskier as the days count down, involving them in warehouse fires and precious time wasted in prison cells. Throughout there’s the reliable fun of seeing these digital natives outwit the boomer cops with their technological know-how.
The solution to the crime is, frankly, preposterous, but you’ll be so caught up in Jet’s race against time you probably won’t mind much anyway. Not just for fans of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
Not Quite Dead Yet, by Holly Jackson (Michael Joseph, $38), is out now.
