Good Bad Girl: A Novel

Good Bad Girl is an addition to the 21st-century trend of woman-focused thrillers. Thrillers—especially crime thrillers, such as this—are fast-paced narratives that use literary devices such as unreliable narrators, red herrings, and omission to create suspense. These thrillers often center on a power struggle between the protagonist and an antagonist; in many crime thrillers, such as detective stories, the protagonist and villain sit on opposite sides of the law. The resolution of these narratives typically ends in the protagonist resolving the questions that motivate the plot. This solution returns the situation to the social status quo that existed before the narrative-driving crimes were committed.

Good Bad Girl engages many of these tropes. Feeney uses a narrative structure that oscillates between multiple characters’ points of view to create cliffhangers at the end of each chapter, thereby generating breakneck pacing. Red herrings—apparent clues intended to mislead the reader—abound in this novel. At the start of Chapter 45, for instance, Patience notes that Liberty has freckles on her nose, just as Patience does. Only pages before, Feeney established that Edith used to call the young Eleanor “Ladybug” because of her freckles. The observation about Liberty’s physicality therefore immediately raises the possibility that Liberty is somehow related to Edith, Clio, and/or Patience; it also suggests that Liberty, not Patience, may be the missing child everyone is looking for. In the end, Liberty’s freckles are nothing more than a coincidence deployed to misdirect the reader. Finally, Feeney often conceals information. None of the characters directly lie about their actions in their narration, but almost all of them hide the truth. Patience’s narration offers a good example of this: Patience knows that she killed Joy, yet her narration elides any mention of what happened after Joy fired her.

While Feeney does employ literary devices associated with crime thrillers, some aspects of Good Bad Girl deviate from the genre’s norms. Most notably, while Feeney does include a character who is a detective—Charlotte Chapman—the detective isn’t the novel’s protagonist, and Charlotte’s proximity to the law doesn’t entail acting in more virtuous ways. Good Bad Girl is interested in Navigating Ambiguous Moralities, questioning what happens when good people are forced to do bad things. As revealed at the end of the novel, many of the novel’s crimes are actually committed by its protagonists. Moreover, the detective chooses to ignore the truth of what really happened upon discovering the characters’ involvement. This novel inverts the crime thriller’s typically black-and-white attitudes toward morality, opting instead for a nuanced exploration of why decent people are driven to actions they later regret.