Summary: One of Us Is Lying

The GIST

One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus is a young-adult mystery that became one of the biggest teen bestsellers of its time. Published in 2017 as McManus's debut novel, it starts from a premise so neat it sells itself: five students at Bayview High walk into detention, and only four walk out alive. The dead boy ran the school's notorious gossip app, and he was one day away from publishing a devastating secret about each of the other four. Every one of them had a reason to want him silenced. Every one of them was in the room.

McManus has said the idea arrived as a single phrase, "The Breakfast Club with murder", and the book wears that inspiration proudly. Its four narrators are the brain, the jock, the princess and the criminal, straight out of a John Hughes film, and its pleasure lies in watching those labels crack. It spent 267 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, collected a shelf of best-of-the-year selections for teen readers, spawned two sequels, One of Us Is Next and One of Us Is Back, and became a television series. It is often described as a cross between The Breakfast Club and Pretty Little Liars, which is accurate, and it moves at the speed of a rumour.

The Story

It is a Monday afternoon, and five students who have no business being in detention find themselves there together. Mr. Avery, a teacher with a strict no-phone policy, has found a mobile phone in each of their bags. All five insist the phones are not theirs and that someone planted them. Nobody listens.

They could hardly be a less likely group. Bronwyn Rojas is the brain: a straight-A overachiever from a well-off family of Ivy League graduates, founder of half the school's clubs, bound for Yale, a girl who has never publicly broken a rule. Cooper Clay is the jock, an all-star baseball pitcher with a promising career ahead of him. Addy Prentiss is the princess, pretty and popular, the homecoming-court girl whose whole life revolves around her boyfriend, Jake. Nate Macauley is the criminal, the school's bad boy, already on probation for dealing drugs. And Simon Kelleher is the outcast who made himself powerful. Simon created About That, an app that publishes the secrets of Bayview students, and the whole school reads it.

A commotion in the parking lot draws the teacher out of the room. Simon, enjoying his captive audience, starts in on the others, casting them as teen-movie stereotypes and himself as the all-knowing narrator. He pours himself a cup of water from the tap and drinks. Moments later he is on the floor in the grip of a violent allergic reaction. Simon has a severe peanut allergy, and the others scramble to help him, but nothing works, and he does not survive.

At first it looks like a terrible accident. Then an anonymous post appears on Tumblr claiming that Simon's death was planned and that his killer sat and watched him die. The police start digging, and they find something on Simon's account: a post he had queued up to publish the next day, with a secret about each of the four students who were in the room with him.

The secrets are exactly the kind that could wreck a future. Bronwyn, the girl who never breaks rules, cheated in chemistry to protect her perfect record, and if that comes out her college dreams may be over. Nate has gone on selling drugs while on probation, which could send him to jail. Addy cheated on Jake with TJ, a boy from their own circle of friends, while Jake was away. And Cooper, according to the post, has been using performance-enhancing drugs, an accusation that could end his baseball career before it starts. Four secrets, four motives, and four teenagers who were alone in a room with the boy who was about to expose them.

The press picks up the story, and the suspects become the Bayview Four. A reporter named Mikhail Powers takes a particular interest in the case. After Simon's funeral the unpublished post leaks, and the whole school learns everything. The fallout is swift. Bronwyn has to face the disappointment of the parents she has always made proud. Nate's house is searched. Cooper's pitching is put under investigation. Addy confesses to Jake, who drops her at once, and a classmate named Vanessa mocks her without mercy.

The story is told in turns by the four of them, in short first-person chapters, so the reader is inside each head and yet never sure how much each narrator is holding back. All four have more to hide than the post revealed. Bronwyn once left Simon a threatening message after he humiliated her younger sister Maeve on his app. Nate lives with an alcoholic father on a disability cheque, which is why he deals in the first place, and he tells people his mother is dead. Cooper has a girlfriend, Keely, and a secret that has nothing to do with steroids. Addy slowly begins to see that her perfect relationship was built on doing whatever Jake wanted.

At first they eye each other with suspicion. Anyone could be the liar. But being hunted by the same police, the same cameras and the same hallway whispers pushes them together, and wary alliance turns into something like friendship. Bronwyn and Nate, the rule-follower and the rule-breaker, find themselves falling for each other. Addy, cast out by her old crowd, leans on her older sister Ashton, who never liked Jake, starts to find out who she is without him, and strikes up an unlikely friendship with Janae, Simon's best friend, an insecure girl who was close to him when few others were. Cooper is forced to decide how much of his real self he can keep hidden, and what it will cost him with his father when he cannot. When one of the four is mocked in the cafeteria, another stands up for him, and for the first time all four sit down at the same table.

Meanwhile the amateur detectives get to work. Maeve, who is as sharp as her sister, hacks into Simon's blog to learn who he really was. A picture forms of a boy who resented each of the four for his own reasons. Old history surfaces, including a figure from Nate's past whom he thought he would never see again. Then the investigation takes a sharp turn. Evidence emerges that points squarely at one of the four, an arrest follows, and Bronwyn goes looking for Eli Kleinfelter, a lawyer with a group that defends people for free. The others are left with a question that has been there from the first page: if none of them did it, who put those phones in their bags, and why were these four chosen?

What It's Really About

The mystery is the hook, but what the book truly cares about is labels and what they hide. McManus begins with four stereotypes and spends the novel taking them apart. The perfect student has cut corners out of terror of being less than perfect. The golden boy is performing a life scripted by someone else. The pretty girl has no idea who she is without a boyfriend to tell her. The delinquent is a kid keeping a household afloat. Reviewers single out this slow complication of types as the book's real achievement, and Addy's growth in particular is the kind of arc readers cheer for.

It is also about secrets in the age of the gossip app. Simon's power comes from the fact that everyone has something to hide and everyone wants to read about everyone else. The novel asks how far a person will go to protect a reputation, and it shows how cruel a school can be to anyone caught out. Around that it touches on things teenagers actually live with: the pressure to get into the right college, controlling relationships, addiction in a family, coming out, depression and bullying. Critics have called its message of empathy and tolerance predictable, and Kirkus felt some of the plotting and language bordered on cliché, but the same reviewers admit it is hard to stop reading.

Some readers arrive wanting a dark thriller and find instead a character drama with a death at its centre; one disappointed reviewer called it a spill-secrets club. Most think that blend is the point. The tone is lighter and more hopeful than the usual murder story, the four leads are easy to love, and the solution, when it comes, fits together piece by piece with very few loose ends.

Who Should Read It

This is ideal for teenagers of about fourteen and up, and for adults who enjoy a quick, clever mystery and have a soft spot for high-school stories. If you like multiple narrators, slow-burn romance between opposites, and a puzzle you can try to solve alongside the characters, it delivers. It is also a strong pick for reluctant readers, since the chapters are short and the pace never lets up. Those looking for a frightening or gritty crime novel should know that the heart of this one is friendship.