Not Quite Dead Yet review: Holly Jackson sticks the landing, but don't expect a happy ending

Rating: 4/5 ⭐️

By the time I finished Not Quite Dead Yet, I just felt sorry for Jet. That's the only way I can describe it. Sorry for a girl I spent 350 pages rooting for, watching her finally figure out how to live, and then losing her anyway.

Let me back up.

It's Halloween night in Woodstock, Vermont. Jet Mason, 27, comes home early from the local festival and gets attacked in her own house. She wakes up in hospital with a skull fracture severe enough that her doctors give her two terrible options: a risky surgery with a slim chance of survival, or roughly a week before an aneurysm kills her. To her family's horror, Jet picks option two. She's going to spend her remaining days finding out who tried to murder her.

Holly Jackson, who most people know from the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder trilogy, makes her adult fiction debut here. And she sticks the landing.

Jet is a genuinely likeable protagonist. Mostly. After the attack, her personality takes a turn. She gets more impatient, more abrasive, a little more convinced she's smarter than everyone around her, including the cops working her case. But honestly? We can chalk that up to the fact that she has seven days to live. I'd be in a mood too. At least she's more motivated than anyone else to solve this thing. When it's your own murder, the stakes are a bit different.

Almost no one in Jet's life is particularly easy to like. Her brother, her sister-in-law (who also happens to be her ex-best friend, which is exactly as messy as it sounds), her mother. They're all varying shades of difficult. Her father is the kinder one, but even he can't balance out the rest. What you slowly start to realise, as Jet investigates, is that this family has been sitting on a whole web of buried secrets. The unpleasantness isn't random. It makes sense by the end.

The one genuinely good person in Jet's life is Billy Finney. Her childhood friend, and coincidentally, the person who hears the dog going wild and kicks the front door in to find her. Once she gets out of the hospital with her seven-day countdown ticking, she teams up with Billy to play detective. Their dynamic carries the whole investigation. Billy is the MVP of this book. He's caring, he's loyal, he doesn't make any of it about himself. Jackson doesn't oversell him, which is exactly why he works.

The story moves at a fast pace. Jet does a genuinely good job of investigating her own murder. We also get to understand why Jet is the person she is: the procrastination, the fear of commitment, the feeling of being stuck. It adds real depth to what could've just been a "cool girl solves crime" premise.

Some of the twists came completely out of the blue. Not the kind where you slap your forehead and go "I should've seen that." The kind where you genuinely didn't see it coming at all.

Here's where the book really got me. I kept expecting Jet to survive. The whole time. She was finally starting to actually live her life, fall in love, care about things. I kept thinking: surely, by some miracle, she'd make it. Maybe she gets hit in the head again and that somehow fixes the aneurysm. Maybe the doctors were wrong. Something. Anything.

But nope.

The physical toll of those seven days is brutal. Constant pain. One side of her body going numb. Her hope that she'd somehow survive, slowly building and then collapsing when she realises she won't. That breakdown hits hard.

And then there's the killer's identity. I won't spoil it, but I will say: it's the most unexpected part of the whole book. The reveal recontextualises most of the family dynamics you've been reading through, and it adds another layer of tragedy to an already tragic story.

In the end, I just felt sorry for the poor girl. She deserved more time. She deserved to live the life she was finally starting to build.

4/5. A unique premise that delivers. Fast-paced, emotionally devastating, and with twists that genuinely catch you off guard. If you're okay with not getting a happy ending, this is a very good book.