One Of Us Is Lying by Karen M McManus

“A sex tape. A pregnancy scare. Two cheating scandals. And that’s just this week’s update. If all you knew of Bayview High was Simon Kelleher’s gossip app, you’d wonder how anyone found time to go to class.”

One Of Us Is Lying is a murder mystery about five highschoolers who go into detention, but only four come our alive.  The dead guy, Simon, runs a notorious school gossip app and it transpires that he was just about to publish life-wrecking dirt on all four of his co-detentionees.  All four are under suspicion, but is the real killer still at large?

Okay, I've seen this book advertised everywhere and usually over-marketing would put me right off a book, but I won a copy of this in a raffle at school, so I decided to give it a go.

Murder mystery isn't something I read a lot of generally, but I have read nearly every one of Agatha Christie's books, so I have a certain appreciation for a well-crafted plot that keeps you guessing as to the identity of the killer.  And this book certainly did that.  I kept changing my views on who had killed Simon until the final reveal.

I think the multiple viewpoints let the book down a bit.  I found it hard to distinguish between the different characters - their voices weren't individual enough - and it made me think that none of the four narrators could possibly be the killer because of certain things they revealed (obviously I won't reveal who the killer is - I guessed it near the end, but I was kept guessing for a long while).

Also, I'm kinda over books riffing on the Breakfast Club.  The 'Ragtag Band of Misfits who Come Together to Defeat a Common Threat' trope wasn't even original when John Hughes made the film and I'm starting to roll my eyes every time I read straplines that start 'The Breakfast Club meets ..... '.

There was some romance in the book (because hey, if you're writing a YA novel you gotta shoehorn some romance in!).  I don't think it really added to the plot and I think it would have worked better if the two characters had just been friends.

All in all this was a fairly good book, but it's been a few weeks since I finished it and I had to get my copy out to flick through before I wrote this review, so it obviously hasn't made a huge impression on me!

3 stars