Book Review #714 - One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus

The Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars, 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."

My Rating: 5.5/10

This book is described as 'The Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars' which I think is a pretty accurate way to describe it. 

The whole premise of 5 people entering detention and only 4 leaving is what initially drew me into deciding to read it but I felt like this premise was not the major focus of the book as the four main suspects had other problems in their lives that had greater focus on them rather than the actual murder.

The book had alternating POV chapters between the 4 stereotypical teenagers. Bronwyn the brain, Cooper the athlete, Nate the criminal and Addy the beauty which sped up the pace of the book. I liked how the characters were made stereotypical on purpose so that over the course of the novel, those stereotypes get broken. 

The teenager that dies in detention was Simon who is described as the outcast. He runs the school newspaper and knows every students dirty secrets, which gives everyone a motive for killing him. 

I loved the whole media hysteria surrounding the murder, as it made it feel more modern and realistic in today's world. 

Throughout the story, as the characters developed it became obvious to me, through process of elimination, who the killer was and the more I thought of that possibility, the more the book made sense and so that ruined the book a little for me. 

I found the end rather rushed, even though I had strong suspicions about how it would end it came rather abruptly with almost no build-up.