Book Re­view: “One of Us is Ly­ing” by Karen Mc­Manus

When you think of a mur­der mys­tery novel, what's the first thing that comes to mind? For some, it might be an old Agatha Christie vol­ume -- the kind of pa­per­back you see on your grand­moth­er's book­shelf that's dusty and looks like it has­n't been read for years. Oth­ers might re­call mem­o­ries of read­ing clas­sic Sher­lock Holmes tales in high school (and writ­ing the three-page es­say that likely fol­lowed). Thank­fully, Karen Mc­Manus has writ­ten a story both for peo­ple who love a good who­dun­nit and for those who might not be as fa­mil­iar with the genre; this story is her de­but novel, “One of Us is Ly­ing,” and it is all at once en­thralling, ex­cit­ing and en­tic­ing. 

The in­trigue be­gins with a gos­sip app cre­ated by Si­mon, one of the stu­dents at the lo­cal high school. Every­one reads it, but no­body par­tic­u­larly likes it -- es­pe­cially when they are the ones who end up in that week's fea­ture story. When Si­mon dies sud­denly in the mid­dle of de­ten­tion sur­rounded by four of the most well-known kids in school, sus­pi­cions be­gin to arise; those four stu­dents were the only ones sur­round­ing Si­mon in his fi­nal mo­ments, but none of them will ad­mit to the killing, and each one sus­pects the other. 

“One of Us is Ly­ing” never has a mo­ment of down­time. Karen Mc­Manus leads her read­ers to sus­pect first one per­son and then the next, and the in­ves­ti­ga­tion be­comes more com­plex and in­trigu­ing as dif­fer­ent chap­ters of the book are nar­rated by each of the four main char­ac­ters. She tops off this per­fect mix with a ro­mance side-plot that com­bines read­ers' in­tel­lec­tual in­volve­ment with their emo­tional in­volve­ment. 

Ul­ti­mately, Mc­Manus’s de­but novel is a stun­ningly in­tri­cate story. Read­ers who love “One of Us is Ly­ing” may also be in­ter­ested in its se­quel, “One of Us is Next,” which was re­leased on Jan. 7.