One of Us Is Lying

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Detention at Bayview High
2. Bronwyn, Nate, Addy and Cooper
3. Simon Kelleher and About That
4. Investigation, Secrets and Janae
5. What Actually Happened in That Classroom
6. What Worked and What Dragged for Me
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up One of Us Is Lying because I wanted something fast that still gave me people to argue about afterward. You know the pitch already, five kids walk into detention and only four walk out, and it sounds like a tagline. I expected a quick airport read. What I got was slower and sadder than that, in a good way.

This is Karen M. McManus's debut, published May 30, 2017 by Delacorte Press, first in the One of Us Is Lying series. The hardcover runs about 358 pages with ISBN 9781524714680. It is told by four narrators in rotation, which felt gimmicky for about twenty pages and then started to make sense. I finished it in three nights, mostly because I kept telling myself one more voice, one more chapter.

The hook is simple. Bayview High. Monday afternoon detention. Bronwyn Rojas, Nate Macauley, Addy Prentiss, Cooper Clay, and Simon Kelleher all show up for Mr. Avery with phones they swear are not theirs. Simon drinks water from a plastic cup at the back of the lab and goes into anaphylaxis from his peanut allergy. The EpiPens are gone. He dies. On Tuesday he had About That posts scheduled that would have exposed all four of the survivors. So of course the police look at them first.

Detention at Bayview High

Mr. Avery runs the kind of classroom where you feel the air change when a phone buzzes. He teaches chemistry or physics depending on the edition you get, but in that room he is mostly a warden. Zero tolerance for phones. On that Monday he finds a phone in each of their bags, even Bronwyn, who has never had detention in her life. They all say the phones were planted. He does not care. He writes them up and keeps them after school in his lab.

That detail bugged me at first. Five kids, all with extra phones, all in the same detention? It feels staged. That is the point, though you do not see it until much later. At the time it just feels like bad luck and a strict teacher.

Simon cannot find his water bottle, so he uses one of the paper cups by the sink at the back. Then there is a crash in the parking lot. Everyone, including Mr. Avery, goes to the window to look. It is loud and messy and perfectly timed to pull eyes away from Simon's cup.

When they turn back, Simon has drunk and is on the floor.

McManus writes this scene well because it is clumsy, not cinematic. His eyes bulge. His lips go blue. He makes choking sounds. Nate dumps his backpack looking for an EpiPen and shouts at him to say where he keeps it. Bronwyn runs. Cooper yells. Addy freezes. Mr. Avery scrambles and cannot find anything that works. The nurse's office, they learn later, has been emptied of EpiPens too. Paramedics take Simon out and he dies at the hospital.

A few days later Officer Budapest and the investigators tell them the autopsy found a large dose of peanut oil ingested shortly before death. The cup has traces. Simon was always careful about food and drink because his allergy was severe. So how did peanut oil get into a cup of tap water in a teacher's lab while five people watched the parking lot?

That question sits over the whole school.

Bronwyn, Nate, Addy and Cooper

The four survivors get labeled the Bayview Four almost right away, and I hated that label in the way you are supposed to hate it. It flattens them. The book spends a lot of time unflattening them.

Bronwyn Rojas is the brain. Yale-bound, straight As, Model UN, daughter of strict parents who track everything. Her younger sister Maeve, who had leukemia at seven and is sharp and funny and tired of being the sick kid in family stories, is probably my favorite secondary character. Bronwyn's secret, the one Simon was going to post, is that she cheated in chemistry. She stole test questions or used an answer key to protect her grades when the pressure got too high. For a kid whose whole identity is doing things right, that lands hard. Her parents are disappointed in that quiet, heavy way that is worse than yelling. She starts working with a high profile lawyer later to help Nate, partly from guilt, partly because she actually likes getting into the facts.

Nate Macauley is the criminal, at least on paper. He is already on probation for dealing. He lives with a dad who drinks too much and works inconsistently. His mom, who struggles with bipolar disorder, left when he was younger and comes in and out. He sells to keep lights on more than to play Scarface. He is prickly and funny in his chapters, quick to assume everyone thinks the worst of him, because most people do. When his house gets searched and his locker gets searched twice, it feels inevitable to outsiders. To the reader, who has been inside his head about his dad and about trying not to get kicked out of school completely, it feels targeted.

Addy Prentiss is the beauty. Homecoming princess, dating Jake Riordan since freshman year, pretty in the way that makes teachers remember her. Her older sister Ashton, who is stuck in a rocky marriage to Charlie and spends a lot of time back at the family house, sees Jake more clearly than Addy does at first. Jake is handsome and popular and controlling. He picks her clothes. He picks her friends. He tells her who to be. Addy's secret is that she cheated on Jake with TJ Forrester, another boy from their circle, after feeling invisible for months. When that comes out on About That, Jake dumps her in public and her friend group drops her cold. Vanessa and the other girls turn fast. She ends up eating lunch nowhere and crying in bathrooms, which is where she actually starts to make a real friend.

Cooper Clay is the athlete. All star baseball pitcher, scouted, big future, perfect girlfriend in Keely. His dad is loud and invested and talks about Cooper's arm like it is a retirement plan. His secret, as Simon framed it, was supposed to be steroid use. The real secret is that Cooper is gay and has been seeing Kris, a college guy, quietly for months. He has not told his family or his team. He likes Keely as a person, which makes the breakup messier. When his sexuality gets dragged into school gossip and sports radio chatter, his performance gets picked apart in a way that has nothing to do with pitching. I thought McManus handled his chapters with care. He is not tortured in a tragic speech way. He is just a kid from a Southern family trying to figure out how to tell his dad without losing him.

Short version? None of them are clean. All of them have something they hid. None of that means they killed Simon.

Simon Kelleher and About That

Simon is the outcast, and the book needs you to sit with how much he liked that role until he hated it.

He created About That, Bayview High's gossip app, with Janae Vargas's help at the start. It posts secrets with screenshots and tips, ruins afternoons, gets quoted at lunch. Everyone reads it. Everyone claims to hate it. Simon sits behind it and feels powerful for once. He is tall and thin and intense, funny in a mean way, the kind of kid who remembers slights from sixth grade and brings them up senior year like they happened yesterday.

On paper his Tuesday post was going to be a four for one special. Bronwyn the cheat. Nate the dealer with a new charge coming. Addy the cheater. Cooper the doper. Each post had enough proof to stick. That is why the police ask about motive right away. If you were about to be exposed to the whole school, would you stop the person posting it?

What you learn slowly is that Simon was sinking for a while. He wanted to be popular and pretended he did not. He rigged votes to get himself onto junior prom court because he wanted that crown photo, then was mortified when Jake found out. He spent hours online in forums where revenge fantasies get likes. He kept lists of who wronged him. Bronwyn once gave him a wrong due date for a project and he missed the deadline. Nate got attention from a girl Simon liked. Cooper got him blacklisted from an after prom party. Small stuff, mostly. In Simon's head it piled up into proof that Bayview would never give him respect.

Janae is the only person who saw how bad it got. Goth clothes, studded bracelets, smart and brittle, crying in the school bathroom after he dies and losing weight fast. She was his best friend when he had no one else. She helped with the app early on. She knew about the depression and the bitterness and the way he stopped being able to tell what was real and what was a story he told himself. I believed their friendship. It felt like two lonely kids who found each other and then one of them went somewhere darker than the other could follow.

About That does not go quiet after Simon dies. Posts keep appearing. Secrets keep dropping. That is the engine for the middle of the book. Who has the password now?

Investigation, Secrets and Janae

The investigation is not slick. It is school hallways and living rooms and lawyers, not forensics montages.

First the four compare notes in secret because no one else believes them. Bronwyn brings order. Nate brings suspicion of everyone. Addy brings access to gossip she used to be inside of. Cooper brings a kind of steadiness, showing up even when his dad tells him to keep his head down for scouts. They meet, they text, they argue about whether talking makes them look guiltier. It does make them look guiltier, and they do it anyway, because the alternative is waiting to be charged.

Then the secrets post one by one. Bronwyn's cheating. Nate's dealing. Addy's affair with TJ. Cooper's relationship with Kris after the steroid rumor fizzles. Each reveal costs them something specific. Bronwyn loses Yale shine for a bit and has to face her parents. Nate gets arrested after EpiPens turn up in his locker, the ones missing from the nurse's office plus Simon's own, planted to point at him. Addy loses Jake, loses her table, has to get a new haircut just to feel like a different person, which sounds small and is not small when you are seventeen. Cooper gets outed before he is ready and has to have the conversation with his dad and his coach while cameras are basically on.

I liked that McManus lets them be angry at each other here. Bronwyn judges Nate. Nate snaps at Bronwyn for acting like a lawyer. Addy is hurt that Cooper knew how to pass and she did not. Cooper is tired of being everyone's good guy. Their alliance is practical, not sweet. They need each other to stay out of jail.

Janae orbits all of this. Addy befriends her after the popular girls cut Addy loose. At first it looks like kindness between two grieving outsiders. Addy sits with her. Listens. Notices the shaking hands and the skipped meals. Janae knows more than she says about the continued posts and about Simon's last weeks, and she keeps almost telling and then pulling back. Bronwyn notices it too. Maeve, Bronwyn's sister, does some digging online and starts connecting times and logins. The sense that Janae is both a victim and a participant grows chapter by chapter.

One small thing that stuck with me: the way teachers and parents react. Mr. Avery is shaken and defensive, replaying the parking lot moment. The principal wants calm. Bronwyn's mother wants statements run past a lawyer. Nate's dad wants to disappear. Addy's mom wants Jake back because Jake looks stable. No adult saves them. Some help, some harm, most just watch.

By the time Nate is in juvenile detention and scared in a way he will not admit, the book has shifted. It started as who poisoned the water. It becomes who is still posting, who moved the EpiPens, and why Simon brought extra EpiPens to the nurse's office that morning if he planned to die.

That last fact is the crack in the wall.

What Actually Happened in That Classroom

This is full spoiler territory, but these notes are supposed to be complete, so here it is as the book lays it out.

Simon killed himself. He put peanut oil in his own water. He counted on the car crash in the parking lot, arranged to pull Mr. Avery and the others to the window, to cover the moment he drank. He had Janae remove EpiPens so no one could save him, including his own from his bag and the spares from the nurse's office. He wanted to die and he wanted the Bayview Four to take the fall for murder. Depression plus revenge, planned like a post.

Why those four? In his notes and in what Janae later admits, it was petty and specific. Bronwyn for the wrong date and for outshining him without trying. Nate for pulling focus with a girl and for easy contempt. Cooper for the party blacklist and for being loved in a way Simon never was. Addy was collateral at first, picked because she cheated on Jake and Simon could use that to pull Jake in.

Jake Riordan is the second hinge. Simon told him the plan and offered him a part. You can get even with Addy, Simon said. Help me, and she will look like my killer. Jake, who was already furious about TJ and already wired to control Addy, said yes. He helped with logistics. He expected Janae to plant the leftover EpiPens and other evidence on Addy to frame her cleanly.

Janae could not do it. She liked Addy by then, or felt guilty, or both. She planted the EpiPens in Nate's locker instead, because Nate was the obvious suspect with a record and no lawyer money. That choice is why Nate gets arrested and sits in detention while Bronwyn scrambles to get him a lawyer who will actually fight. Janae takes a plea bargain later for her role, which felt right to me. She did not kill Simon, but she helped set a death in motion and then helped point it at a boy she knew could go down for it.

Addy learns all this at Janae's house. She goes to talk, Janae finally tells the truth about Simon's depression, the prom rigging, the forums, the suicide plan, Jake's part. While Addy is still there, Jake shows up. He has been harassing Janae for messing up the plant. Addy tries to hide and record him. He finds her. He drags her into the woods behind the house, smashes her head on a rock, tries to choke her. It is brutal and fast and not stylized. Cooper, who came with Addy and saw Jake arrive, pulls Jake off and gets her and Janae away. Police take Jake into custody.

After that the legal tangle loosens. Nate is released, though jail has rattled him badly enough that he pushes Bronwyn away for a while and breaks off what was starting between them. He is ashamed and angry and does not know how to be grateful without feeling small. Bronwyn tells him they cannot go back to how things were, which is honest, then later says yes to a movie when he asks again. It is tentative, not a big kiss in the hallway. Addy cuts Jake off for good, leans on Ashton, starts over without the princess rules. Cooper tells the truth about Kris and keeps pitching, with his dad having to adjust or lose his son. Janae faces what she did.

Simon was wrong about secrets, Janae says in different words near the end. They all come out eventually. His just came out last.

What Worked and What Dragged for Me

What worked was the voice rotation once it settles. Bronwyn sounds like Bronwyn, all lists and worry. Nate sounds tired and dry. Addy starts vague and gets sharper as she stops performing for Jake. Cooper sounds kind and guarded. I could tell who was talking without the header by the middle, which is the test.

The mystery mechanics worked too. The planted phones, the missing EpiPens, the extra EpiPens Simon logged at the nurse's office, the continued About That posts, the Tumblr drafts and forum history Maeve finds. It is fair play without being easy. I guessed part of it, missed the Jake piece completely, and felt good about both.

Here is the fair criticism part, because no book gets a pass.

The middle sags. There are a lot of hallway interviews and lawyer meetings and news van scenes that repeat the same beat: someone suspects them, they protest, they find a small clue. With four narrators, some chapters cover the same day from a slightly different angle without adding enough. I skimmed a couple of Bronwyn and Nate loops around the two hundred page mark. If you want nonstop twists, the stretch after the first secrets post will test you.

The police work is thin. Officer Budapest gets a couple of solid scenes, but a lot of the actual digging is done by teenagers with phones and a sister who is good at search. That is normal for YA, and McManus keeps it plausible by having the kids find social stuff rather than lab results, but do not come here for procedure.

And the romance endings are tidy. Bronwyn and Nate pause and restart a little too neatly. Addy's fresh start feels quick after what Jake did to her in the woods. Cooper's dad softens faster than I believed. I get why. This is book one of a series and McManus wants hope on the last page. I just wanted one more messy conversation before the movie invite and the smiles.

None of that broke it for me. The core is strong: a depressed boy who decides to turn his death into punishment, a friend who helps and regrets it, a boyfriend who uses it for control, and four kids who have to tell the truth about themselves to prove they did not kill anyone. If you like Breakfast Club dynamics with actual stakes, or if you liked A Good Girl's Guide to Murder but want more time inside suspects' heads, pick this up. Just do not read it right before bed. You will stay up to check who posted what.

FAQ

Who killed Simon in the book?

In the book Simon Kelleher put peanut oil in his own water and had Janae Vargas remove the EpiPens, planning suicide that would frame the other four. Jake Riordan joined the plan to punish Addy for cheating, and Janae later planted evidence on Nate instead of Addy.

When was One of Us Is Lying published and is it part of a series?

It was published May 30, 2017 by Delacorte Press as book one of the One of Us Is Lying series. This summary follows the hardcover text listed at about 358 pages with ISBN 9781524714680.

Is One of Us Is Lying only for teens?

They are written for teens but widely read by adults who like school mysteries. The book deals with suicide, bullying, outing, and domestic control, so sensitive readers should take care.