Review: One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus

Published: 30th May 2017

Pages: 368

Synopsis: “One of Us Is Lying is the story of what happens when five strangers walk into detention and only four walk out alive. Everyone is a suspect, and everyone has something to hide.

Pay close attention and you might solve this.

On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.

Bronwyn, the brain, is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule.

Addy, the beauty, is the picture-perfect homecoming princess.

Nate, the criminal, is already on probation for dealing.

Cooper, the athlete, is the all-star baseball pitcher.

And Simon, the outcast, is the creator of Bayview High’s notorious gossip app.

Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention Simon's dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn’t an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he’d planned to post juicy reveals about all four of his high-profile classmates, which makes all four of them suspects in his murder. Or are they the perfect patsies for a killer who’s still on the loose?

Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you would go to protect them.”

Rating: ****

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There was a lot of hype surrounding One Of Us Is Lying, which made it unusual for me in the fact that I pre-ordered and read on the day of it's release. This is something I haven't done since the original Harry Potter books came out as I usually try to avoid the hype to better enable me to make up my own mind.

I am pleased I didn't wait. One Of Us Is Lying was a classic crime set-up with a teenage angst filled modern twist. Very well written with appropriately paced twists and cliff-hangers. There was a lot of character development for the 4 main characters involved, and an awful lot of negative character development surrounding the dead student.

The one downside for me was the conclusion. The perpetrator's identity was a slight let down in my opinion, and did take away from the book as a whole slightly.

I would recommend One of Us is Lying to readers who are currently at secondary school and have experience of the dynamic and the cliques, readers who have attended mainstream secondary school and have experience of the dynamic and cliques, readers who enjoy books generally set in secondary schools and readers who enjoy crime/thrillers/mysteries/whodunits. So, I’d recommend this to pretty much everyone.

I would definitely read more by Karen McManus as this was such a good read!