Book of the Month - January

Title: One Of Us is Lying

Author: Karen M. McManus

Rating: 5*

Goodreads Link!

Firstly, January was a great month for reading! I read four books and have already uploaded blog posts for two of them. My January book is ONE OF US IS LYING, a Breakfast Club inspired novel where four students are thrown into the whirlwind mystery of a boy's death.

When Addie, Nate, Cooper, and Bronwyn are the last to see classmate Simon alive in detention, they all become murder suspects. Each with secrets of their own that Simon planned on revealing, they all have contemplative motives. Under questioning by police whilst dealing with their own ruining lives, the four find their lives irreversibly changed by one boy on the biggest revenge trip of high school stories. The murder investigation shakes each of their worlds, pulling them apart, only to knit them back together again with new lives and ambitions.

With each page, this book has you guessing a new suspect. Weaving attraction, secrets, betrayal and social hierarchy into one intricately thought out story, McManus' book has people guessing the suspect before they're revealed, before changing their minds. This book turned me into some sort of distant Sherlock, texting out detailed theories for each new person it could have been to my friend, who'd previously read this book. I'm sure she watched with amused content as I scrambled for the answer and the how.

This book was an entirely new kind of read for me. Usually I can't take to mystery. I can be an impatient reader so to have something lengthy and guessing for that entire time sounded sure to irritate me. What I found was myself being pleasantly surprised. ONE OF US IS LYING has so many plot twists--and what you find out in the end is that, really, they're all lying. To each other, to themselves, to their parents, and not everything is about Simon.

Given from each students' POV, this book offers all sides of the investigation--and the devastation that follows when wrongly questioned for a crime and having every secret held closely unravelled so calculatingly. This book is quite possibly for fans of GOODBYE PERFECT, (in terms of thinking you know people well but you actually don't and police playing a massive part in the puzzle) and, well, those who liked the dynamic of THE BREAKFAST CLUB in terms of character profiles.