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.