One Of Us Is Lying by Karen M McManus

Yale hopeful Bronwyn has never publicly broken a rule. Sports star Cooper only knows what he’s doing in the baseball diamond. Bad body Nate is one misstep away from a life of crime. Prom queen Addy is holding together the cracks in her perfect life. And outsider Simon, creator of the notorious gossip app at Bayview High, won’t ever talk about any of them again. He dies 24 hours before he could post their deepest secrets online. Investigators conclude it’s no accident. All of them are suspects. Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you’ll go to protect them.

I absolutely adored this book, its exciting, suspenseful and full of twists and turns. Reading this book was like watching a TV show, there were little clues dotted around too see if you could solve the mystery before the end. Like everyone I had my suspicions of who it would be, but I was not 100% correct. But I didn’t mind because the journey getting to the end was worth reading this brilliant book.

One Of Us Is Lying starts with five students in detention, who all have some sort of secret to hide. Then Simon, one of the students, drinks some water and suspiciously dies. The other four students in the room are then suspected of his murder. It all becomes a little more sinister the day after Simon’s death when messages online appear, confessing to the murder, and also threaten to leak secrets about the other students that were in detention when Simon died.

After reading this description for this book I immediately bought the book because I have never read a YA murder mystery before and this sounded really intriguing. The book is being compared to Gossip Girl meets Pretty Little Liars, I love both of them shows, and I think thats why I love this book. I read this in only a couple of sittings because once you start reading, its very difficult to set it back down again.

The four main characters in the book are described as a Geek, a Jock, a Criminal and a Princess. Now having seen them described as this, I was little scared that the characters would be a little two-dimensional and not have any depth to them, but I was completely wrong. All the characters had a wealth of detail to them and I enjoyed learning more and more about them as I read on. The interesting thing about this book is that the more and more you learn about each character, the more you start to suspect them and think to yourself whether they are capable of murder.

Apart from the slow start at the beginning I have to say the pacing for this book is spot on. I did find the first few chapters a little hard to get into, but once I past that hurdle it was full steam ahead and I couldn’t stop reading. I found myself reading a chapter and thinking I would put the book down when I have finished the current chapter, but because the end has completely changed my suspicions, I have to read on and I find myself reading for another hour.

I didn’t know this was the authors debut book because it reads like she has read a load of books before this. The way she writes is brilliant for this type of story because its got just the right amount of information to keep you interested, but also not overload you with too much useless information. I found the way she wrote each of the teenage characters believable and relatable. The teenagers are proper teenagers and not what authors think teenagers are like.

If you love an intriguing and interesting take on the murder mystery story then you should definitely give One Of Us Is Lying a read. Even if you don’t normally read YA, I think all ages will enjoy reading this thrilling mystery story. I could not recommend this book enough. Go out and buy it now and see what all the hype is about, because the hype is real.

I rate this book 5/5 stars