One Of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus is a murder mystery novel that starts one afternoon when five high school seniors enter detention. These are the characters in the book.
Addy, the beauty (the prom queen)
Bronwyn, the brain (has a one-way ticket to Yale)
Cooper, the athlete (on the way to the MLB)
Nate, the criminal (on probation for selling drugs)
And Simon, the outcast (started an online gossip app, About That)
The weird thing is all the students are in detention for the same thing. They have their phones in class, but the catch is that the phones in all of the students’ backpacks aren’t theirs, So when all the phones go off simultaneously, all the students are assigned after-school detention. When in detention, the teacher in the room looks out the window and sees a car crash in the school parking lot. The teacher runs out of the room to deal with the crash when Simon gets up to have a drink of water, has an allergic reaction, collapses to the ground, and later dies at the hospital.
The next day, the same students who were in detention with Simon were called to the school’s office to be asked questions about the Simon case. No one else was called because Bronwyn, Addy, Nate, and Cooper were the last to see Simon alive, and their deepest, darkest secrets are on About That, waiting to be posted and may help the case.
When in the office, the police showed each student what Simon would post about themselves. After the reading, each student tells their family what Simon said, and soon, they all get a lawyer to deal with the case. Which doesn’t help, and soon, their families are broken apart. Soon, the students take things into their own hands and solve the case well. Bronwyn’s sister, Maeve, solves the case. But things in Bayview(their town) never return to normal because there’s a second and third novel.
This novel is one of my favorites. It will keep you guessing until the end. It also deals with real situations like self-identity, suicide, heartbreak, and how far you would go to keep your secrets from spilling. If you need a good mystery, I 100% recommend this novel.
