One Of Us Is Lying February Book of the Month

I was recently sent a fantastic new novel from Penguin Random House Children's Publishers via Netgalley. One Of Us Is Lying is the latest book from Karen M McManus and comes under quite a few genres, mysteries and thrillers, teens and young adults. I was immediately drawn to it after reading the blurb.

Five students go to detention. Only four leave alive.

On Thursday 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 bad boy, is already on probation for dealing. Cooper, the jock, 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 Thursday, he died. But on Friday, 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 just 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.

Five kids are sent to detention, and they happen to be sent for the same reason, having phones in their bags, even stranger than this, the kids all swear that the phones found on them aren't actually theirs, someone has set them up but who and for what reason?

Well these questions suddenly become unimportant when one of the students, Simon, suddenly begins to have an allergic reaction, he had just drunk a cup of water but his allergy is to peanuts, queue panic stations, as Nate holds Simon, the other kids scramble to ring 911 whilst desperately trying to find an Epipen that would save Simon's life.

Hours later Simon is dead and suddenly there are 4 students left each being suspected of murder and as it is later revealed from an unpublished post on Simon's gossip sight, they each had a motive, a reason to want to keep him quiet but which one would be pushed far enough to go to such lengths to stop that post from being published?

The story is told from 4 POV, we get the thoughts and emotions felt by each of the students involved, this I felt added a great depth to the tale. It was a great way of adding in more red herrings, more food for thought.

There are an abundance of twists in this book and every time I thought I had it figured out, I was suddenly proved wrong again. Was it really one of the kids in the room, possibly the teacher who was in charge of detention or someone else who managed to sneak in unnoticed, there seemed to be a number of suspects, each of whom had reason to dislike Simon.

This is a book that you just can't put down until you reach the end, it took me 6 hours but I just had to know who done it. The narrative is intense, the storyline crazy smart and with so much depth to each character I really felt immersed in it all. A mystery that was unpredictable and kept you guessing right along with those poor high school students. One Of Us Is Lying is a debut novel that will blow many in this genre out of the water.