In seven days Jet Mason will be dead.
Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. She’ll do it later, she always says. She has time.
Until, on the night of Halloween, Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder.
She suffers a catastrophic brain injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, she’ll suffer a deadly aneurysm.
Jet never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her ex-best friend turned sister-in-law, her former boyfriend.
She only has seven days, and as her condition deteriorates she has only her childhood friend Billy for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:
Jet is going to solve her own murder.

‘Not Quite Dead Yet‘ called to me partly because it’s Holly Jackson’s first explicitly non-YA book, partly because of the jaunty title and partly because of the premise: a woman who, left with seven days to live before an aneurysm incurred when she was attacked kills her, decides to spend those days hunting her murderer. In a gruesome sort of way, it sounded fun.

I hadn’t expected it to be such a powerfully emotional book. I’d thought that it would be plot/puzzle focused with a gimmick of ‘See how clever I was to solve my own murder?‘ At first, that’s what it seemed to be, but that was mostly a story the Jet was telling herself to keep her imminent death from feeling real. 

There was a clever puzzle in the plot, with lots of secrets to uncover and suspects to investigate, but, for me, the most remarkable part of the book was watching Jet come to understand all that she was going to lose when she died. Murder victims often get marginalised in crime fiction. The focus moves, unsurprisingly perhaps, to the living: the investigators, the murderer and the survivors. Little time is spent on the loss the murdered person suffered. This book focuses on the murder victim. 

At first, that focus is on the murder victim, Jet, as an amateur sleuth. In the few intense days she spends investigating her murder, she finally starts to embrace her life. She gets to see her family, her friends, her home town and, eventually, herself differently. She comes to understand how long she has been deferring living, waiting for her real life to begin.

What prevented this from being saccharine was that Jet wasn’t a particularly nice person. She was clever, was often funny and was loved by some of the people around her. She was also unconscious of her own privilege, careless of the emotions of others and driven so much by a concept of what she thought her life ought to be that she paid little attention to what it actually was. Some of that is explained by the trauma of her older sister’s unexpected death when Jet was a child. Some of it is just Jet being Jet.

Despite it jaunty title, ‘Not Quite Dead Yet’ is a deeply sad book, filled with tragedy, waste, guilt, selfishness and anger. It’s not a story you can hold at arm’s length. 

Three things hits me the hardest: watching Jet understand too late the potential of the a relationship she’s always kept in the friend zone, watching her lose trust in everyone around her as her pool of suspect s expands, and watching her frustration as her physical and mental state start to decline and her imminent death becomes real to her. 

I recommend listening to the audiobook, narrated by Alex McKenna. She gives an extraordinary performance that matches the depth of emotions in the book. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.