In search of my killer

Hit YA author's first book for adults is a whodunnit with a twist.

- BRIGID FEEHAN

NOT QUITE DEAD YET by Holly Jackson (Michael Joseph, $38)

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.