One of Us is Lying - Karen M. McManus

Title: One of Us is Lying
Author: Karen M. McManus
Genre: YA
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 360
Date read: March, 2022

What happens when five strangers walk into detention and only four walk out alive? Everyone is a suspect, and everyone has something to hide.

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.


I've been wanting to read this for several years, and with good reason as it turned out. I could not put it down and just wanted to know both what happened next, and the reason why everything was happening.

Fortunately it did not disappoint. Karen McManus managed to keep me guessing until the very end, while still providing a believable and satisfying conclusion to everything. I'm not usually a fan of the unreliable narrator writing style, but thanks to the nature of the book (and the characters) it totally worked here.

The characters have been compared to those from "The Breakfast Club", and I totally get that. There are definitely shades of some of them (Bender especially), but I think they did a better job of bending stereotypes here - although that's probably because the plot was stretched out over more than just a Saturday.

I did have a few issues here and there, which pulled the rating down a notch, but I still really liked it, and will definitely be looking into more books by this author.