One Of Us Is Lying

One of Us Is Lying is a young adult mystery by the American writer Karen M. McManus, published in 2017 and her first novel.

The four suspects take turns narrating, and the book gets much of its energy from the gap between how each of them describes the same events and what the reader can see is missing. Bronwyn has never broken a rule and is on her way to Yale, Addy has spent years being the perfect girlfriend, Nate is on probation and expects to be blamed, and Cooper is the school's best pitcher with a father who has planned his career since childhood. Simon's app has been posting their secrets one at a time, and after his death a message appears promising the rest of them, which turns the investigation into a countdown. McManus uses the school's social arrangements and the police interviews as the two machinery of the plot. The novel spent five years on the New York Times bestseller list and was followed by One of Us Is Next in 2020 and One of Us Is Back in 2023.