One of Us is Lying: A book review

From the sound of the book’s title, your first guess would probably not be that this book is a total murder mystery. Surprise! The murder does not even take long to happen: by the end of the second chapter, the deed is done. And by the way do not worry because this is not a spoiler.

Before I start any further though, this book is definitely a book for people who like quick paced action and/or whodunit type novels. And another thing, try not be the person who skips to the last page of the book to find out who really did it. This not only will completely ruin the rest of the book for you, but it takes away from the whole mystery aspect of the story.

To give a quick summary of what happens in the novel it begins with five students being sent to detention. These five students remind me almost exactly of the movie the Breakfast Club, with “the brain,” “the athlete,” “the princess,” “the criminal,” and “the basketcase.” In this story however, they also have different nicknames- “the brain,” “the beauty,” “the criminal,” “the athlete,” and “the outcast.” This story also differs in that the outcast dies and then the other four other students are all put under scrutiny by the police as the investigation of the murder goes on.

The four all claim that they didn’t do it, but in reality they all have reasons to have wanted the basketcase dead. In fact, the entire school could have reason to want Simon dead. In his early years of high school, Simon got the idea to create a gossip app specifically for the students at his school, so you can see why this would make the student body want to do something to him, maybe not necessarily kill him but do something.

But since these four students were in detention with Simon, and they had reasons to want to hush him, they become the prime suspects in the murder. It is not until the brain, Bronwyn, takes matters into her own hands that the real story starts to come out. She begins looking into the clues- a cup, the gossip apps hidden posts, and mysterious posts that someone keeps adding- but you will have to read to find out if she figures out what really happened that day in detention.