One of Us is Lying Review

This week’s novel is One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus.  I heard about this because it was one of the Goodreads Choice Awards nominees for 2017.

Five high school kids end up in detention for crimes they did not commit.  During that detention, one of the kids, Simon, goes into anaphylactic shock and dies.  Now the four remaining students are under suspicion of murdering him, and they all have motive since Simon ran a school gossip app that was about to post devastating information about each of them.

This was a good mystery in that I had suspicions, but I was never 100% sure until the truth came out at the end.  The point of view revolves through the four main characters as they try to solve the murder and deal with the fallout of the police investigating them, the school turning against them, and their misdeeds coming out.  I kept expecting some underhanded compartmentalization nonsense, and I appreciated it when it didn’t happen.  Maybe that’s a spoiler, but I would have liked to know that.

I also liked the weird challenges that the kids had to wrestle with.  When they all lawyer up, their lawyers all recommend that they keep their distance from each other, but at the same time the murder club (as they start calling themselves) can’t explain how hard their situation is to anyone else.  I liked the moral ambiguity in Simon’s app.  His gossip mongering is awful, but at the same time cheating is awful too.  I liked how everyone hated Simon, but after he died few people would talk about how bad he was, and the main characters especially can’t for fear of implicating themselves.

I also liked the characters.  They start off as clichés, but as the book goes on, they fill out and contain multitudes, and it ends up that they had molded themselves into clichés because it was easier for them.

***

Next week: Bunnicula, silly horror for kids by James and Deborah Howe.