Series: –

Published: June 1st 2017

Genre: YA, Mystery

Pages: 368

Language read: English

Format read: eArc, ebook

Rating: 4.5 stars 

One of Us Is Lying Synopsis: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. –Goodreads

I wanted to read this book from the first time I found out about it from another book blog. The whole premise and the synopsis sounded really interesting and exciting. Who doesn’t find The Breakfast Club mixed with a murder mystery interesting? I certainly did. I immediately went and asked for the book on Netgalley, and when I got approved I was really happy.

This book is the Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars (not the part of PLL where they drag out everything and you lose interest before you find out who big A is). It follows the 4 teenagers that was in detention, when Simon, a fellow peer drops to the floor dying from a deadly allergy shock. The death of Simon is suspicious and the four witness becomes the key suspects in the investigation. Who killed Simon? And why?

There is so many things I loved about this book, and it is one of my favorite reads so far this year. This book started of with an explosion of questions that I had to get the answer to asap, why and who? And what are they hiding? This book sucked me in from the first page. The writing was engaging and easy to follow, and the mystery was really interesting. I also really liked the story and the characters, they were amazing. Overall I loved this book and I highly recommend it if you are looking for an addictive read.

There is something I just have to mention that is not negative, but I just have to comment on. As I said above, I really loved The Breakfast Club premise, so I went into the book thinking it was going to be more of a retelling of the movie where one of the characters die at the end of the story. So to my surprise the victim dies at the start of the book, within a couple of pages. The death was just the beginning of the book. So don’t go into the book and think that it is going to be a close retelling. You can see that the author has taken inspiration from the movie, especially when it comes to the characters.

In this book you follow four main characters, two girls and two boys;

Bronwyn the Brain

Addy the beauty

Nate the criminal

Cooper the athlete

(Here you clearly see the inspiration from the Breakfast Club).

I just loved all of the four main characters. They all had their own personal secrets and struggles, and everybody had a great character growth through the book. The story is written in first person, and I think that worked really well. We got to know the characters and the story through their eyes.

As the title of the book says; One Of us Is Lying. They all have their own secrets and reasons to lie, and anyone of them can be the murderer. I couldn’t picture anyone of them to be the murderer, and the thought that one of them had killed Simon broke my heart. I’m not going to say who did it, because spoilers, so I’m not going to say if my heart broke or not. You have to find that out yourself!

My favorite characters was Bronwyn and Nate. Bronwyn is the brain with straight A’s and Nate is the low life criminal. Their relationship was very interesting, and I love their interaction with each other (cute! Hint hint romance). P.S. I have never heard the name Bronwyn before, I always read it as Brownyn, haha.

I also found the character Simon very interesting. I really want to read the story from his perspective, I want to be inside his brain. Karen M. Mcmanus, can you write a short story from Simon’s perspective? Please. Maybe not the whole story from his perspective but perhaps the days leading up to his death? Or some of the other incidents that we got to hear about in the book? That would be AWESOME!

I can’t write this review without talking about the mystery, who murdered Simon? The mystery unravels at the end, and we get to know who the killer is, just like most thriller books. I always try to figure out who the killer is before the book gives it away, and I make up many different theories. Probably not the only one who does that, it is half of the fun of reading murder mysteries. I had one theory of who the killer was, and in the end I was partly right, so it didn’t come as a shock to me.

This was a well written, incredibly engaging and interesting YA mystery novel. I loved so many things about this book. It sucked me in and I couldn’t put it down, I just had to know who killed Simon. I give this book 4.5/5 stars.

I received this copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks to Netgalley, Penguin Random House UK & Karen M. McManus for giving me a copy of this book.

❤ -Rakel

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