One of Us Is Lying

About the One of Us Is Lying series

Five students walk into detention; only four walk out alive. Simon Kelleher, the outcast behind Bayview High's cruel secret-sharing app, dies from an allergic reaction during detention, and the other four in the room — a jock, a criminal, a princess, and a brain, in classic high-school-movie shorthand — instantly become suspects when it turns out someone tampered with his EpiPen. Told in rotating first-person chapters from all four suspects, the book unravels which of them had the strongest motive, what secrets Simon was about to post about each of them, and whether his death was murder at all. The sequels widen the lens beyond the original four: One of Us Is Next introduces a new copycat game terrorizing Bayview a year and a half later, and One of Us Is Back brings the whole cast together again as their pasts catch up with them.

Karen M. McManus built her breakout hit around the classic locked-room mystery structure crossed with high-school clique archetypes and social-media-era secrets, and the trilogy keeps that same rotating-suspect, everyone-has-something-to-hide formula while raising the stakes and body count each time. It's fast, twisty, and unapologetically plot-driven, with each book functioning as a genuinely fair-play whodunit rather than just a vibes-based thriller.

How to read this series

Read all three books in publication order: One of Us Is Lying, One of Us Is Next, One of Us Is Back. While each book has its own central mystery, the cast and their unresolved history carry through all three, and later books spoil the endings and killer reveals of earlier ones, so publication order is the only sensible way in.

There's no companion material, novella, or side reading to worry about — this is a tight, self-contained trilogy meant to be read straight through, ideally without much of a gap between books given how tightly the plots interlock.