The Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars, 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.

After reading so many fantasy and historical novels this year, I’ve decided to give it a break and end my 2018 with a contemporary. One of Us Is Lying was a book everyone seemed to talk about at least one point of this year and I was dying to get my hands on it and see for myself if it really lives up to the hype.

As most of you are already familiar with, One of Us Is Lying is a story about five, seemingly unconnected people who all end up in detention on the same Monday afternoon. But only four of them make it out alive. Simon—a boy who ran a gossip app of some sort—was murdered, and the suspicion automatically falls on the other four, who claim to know nothing. Each of them had a motive and an opportunity, and each hid a secret on their own, one Simon was dangerously close to sharing on his app. But did they do it?

No matter how compelling that summary sounded, if you were up for a thrilling mystery that would keep you on the edge of your seat, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you because, well, you won’t find it here. Or at least I didn’t. That doesn’t necessarily make this a bad book though, and it doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy reading it or that I would never recommend it.

For me, One of Us Is Lying was a perfect contemporary, the kind to read in (almost) one sitting under a warm blanket on a cold winter day. The characters, despite seeming quite annoying and way too basic at the beginning developed quite nicely and eventually pleasantly surprised me. There was also a cute, although extremely cliché romance. That was one of the problems I’ve had with this book- it wasn’t bad but there were too many clichés that were trying too hard not to be clichés but most of them still ended up the same way that all clichés that are trying not to be clichés do. (If you get what I’m trying to say lol) Although I didn’t mind it that much, it still kind of “dimmed” the whole experience of the book for me since it left me feeling as if I’ve seen all of it before.

But the main issue I’ve had with this book was regarding the mystery part of the plot—or lack thereof. Sure, this being a YA book means that there will obviously be some fluff and high school drama, but since it’s also categorized as a mystery, I expected there to be more tension, sleuthing and mind-blowing twists. But in reality, that part takes about one third of the book, if not even less, and the rest is just teenage drama. Also, it seemed like whenever the characters actually uncovered something, it was only because someone else said a convenient thing at a convenient time or made a connection instead.

I understand the need to get to know characters a bit better in order to understand their actions and reasoning, but still, I feel like there should have been more crime/mystery elements. As it is, I found that I wasn’t really invested in the whole murder thing and just mildly curious as to who the murderer was.

I’ll have to admit that I didn’t really guess how it would end, although it has crossed my mind. To be completely honest, I was kind of underwhelmed by the ease with which it was solved, since I was hoping for a darker, more unexpected twist. But it was okay, I guess.

Basically: good characters + underdeveloped (murder) plot = not that good of a thriller, but a fun contemporary novel nonetheless. It was not that bad for a debut novel either, and I’m looking forward to reading some of Karen M. McManus’s other work in the future.