Book Review: One of Us is Lying

This is another book someone recommended to me and I put on my wait list. Lucky me, it arrived right before I left for vaca. I had lots of reading time. One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus was a delightful beach read. (fruity umbrella drink not included)

Basic Summary (Courtesy of GoodReads):

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.

My thoughts:

I grew up with Breakfast Club, I’m a child of the 80s. And yeah, this book has a similar premise. Five very different kids go to detention. But almost anything described in a short sentence premise can sound like several other things. The two stories are really very little alike.

I’ll be honest. I LOVED this book. I did. It was funny. It was real.

But it was also madly predictable. I was never shocked. There is no suspense. Probably because I knew who done it like a third of the way in. So every “shock” value action after that made sense to me because I knew who was pulling the strings.

But I still LOVED it.