One of Us is Lying (One of Us is Lying, #1)

First Lines: A sex tape. A pregnancy scare. Two cheating scandals. And that’s just this week’s update. If all you knew of Bayview High was Simon Kelleher’s gossip app, you’d wonder how anyone found time to go to class.

So I wanted to read this not because it definitely sounded like something I’d like (though I do enjoy mysteries), but because it was so popular. I needed to see what all the hype was about. So if you’re someone who hasn’t read this and you’re wondering the same thing, this is for you.

Five students walk into detention on a Monday afternoon. Only four come out alive. The group is as unlikely as they are diverse. Bronwyn (the brains), Addy (the princess), Nate (the criminal), Cooper (the athlete), and Simon (the outcast). Only Simon never makes it out, and soon the police investigation determines his death wasn’t an accident. He died on Monday, but on Tuesday, he was set to post a revealing article about all four of the suspects–the students in the room with him. Is one of them guilty? Or have they been framed while a killer is still loose? Who has secrets so dark they’d be willing to kill over them?

The book jacket is certainly attention-getting. 5 kids walk into detention, 4 kids walk out alive. Who did it? And why? I like mysteries, so I thought this would be pretty good. However, what I dislike is these books that are more about who has the strongest motive (basically, who has the darkest secret?) and none of the speculation is really based in any real evidence. It’s frustrating because it doesn’t seem like the case makes much progress through most of the book.

Also, speaking as a teacher here, I know students can be nasty to each other, but I swear this class was made up of the absolute worst of humanity all shoved into one grade. The stuff they were doing was just horrible and I have never seen so many terrible people in one cafeteria. I know that this is probably a dramatic device more than anything, but I can’t help feeling like this sometimes normalizes this behavior for readers who may not know any better. It seems like all YA is printing anymore are books about horrible people with secrets to hide. We all have secrets, and social media is unforgiving, but the biggest scandals at my high school was who was dating who and maybe a pregnancy scare.

I’ll get off that train now. I did come to like the characters throughout the story. Cooper, Addy, Bronwyn, and Nate were people we didn’t necessarily like at the beginning but came to like as we got to know them more. They all had different personalities and underwent a lot of character development as the story went on.

I just thought the story was so slow. When I saw how the story was set up, just constantly pointing fingers at other people, I knew it was going to be a long read. There’s just very little in the story that makes it feel like you’re getting any closer to solving the mystery until near the end.

And because these mysteries are getting more common, I more or less figured out how it would end from the very beginning. It was just predictable to me.

YA Trends: The Unsolvable Mystery

Hey everyone!  I tell you what, being in quarantine has put me more in touch with the YA world than I have been since college.  (I did the math the other day–I’ve read 21 books these past 2 months.  Last year during this time?  I read 4.)

As I was doing dishes the other day, I started to realize there was a low-level trend taking place in YA that really isn’t getting a lot of attention.  And I wanted to talk about the pros and the cons about it.

What is it?

I’m titling this trend the “unsolvable mystery.” Basically, this is a mystery that is crafted in such a way that the reader is not supposed to know who the killer is (because it’s usually a murder story) until The Big Reveal. The best non-YA example of this I can think of is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (which is a classic that you totally need to read if you haven’t).  And, to a lesser extent, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries fit this as well.

What are some examples?

I’m so glad you asked.  Well, I asked for you, but still.  These are the examples that immediately came to mind:

• Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco
• Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
• All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban
• One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus  (I’m currently reading this, which inspired this post!)

I will refer to these (and occasionally And Then There Were None) as necessary to make my points.  But if you haven’t read them, no worries.  I intend to stay spoiler-free.

What’s awesome about this trend?

First of all, anyone who’s paying any attention to YA will know that two or three out of the four I listed are huge bestsellers.  Truly Devious, a trilogy revolving around the kidnapping and disappearance in Vermont, just wrapped up this year.  Karen McManus just dropped the sequel to One of Us is Lying a few months ago.  And Stalking Jack the Ripper has been an incredibly popular series for years.  (All Your Twisted Secrets only just came out recently and is a standalone, putting it in a slightly different category than the others, as series. Popularity is a little harder to judge in that case.)

Obviously these books sell very well.  Why?

Well, because the stories are a puzzle. You’re introduced to a high-stakes mystery early on in the story. In One of Us, 5 kids went to detention but only 4 left alive. In Twisted Secrets, there’s a scholarship dinner that turns out to be a trap, leaving the 6 students locked in a room with a bomb and a clock counting down.

They also sometimes make the focus of the story more about character. Truly Devious and Stalking focus on characters obsessed with solving crimes, which allows us to experience the stories from an “expert” standpoint.  In these stories, we can basically count on the fact that our main character is more observer than participant in any crime.  The other stories? That line gets blurred.

Because these stories focus on crimes, the suspense level is usually quite high. Twisted is a heart-pounding, can’t-put-down read because the secrets slowly start coming out. What I’ve read so far of One of Us, it seems very similar. Stalking follows a serial killer most of us are fairly familiar with (some more than others).

So these stories are exciting, hard to put down, and keep the reader guessing.

So what’s the downside?

In my opinion, they’re starting to get predictable.  That happens with just about any trend that picks up speed, from mysteries to contemporary romance to vampire tales.

Let’s start by discussing the Queen of Mystery, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.  This story completely revolutionized the mystery genre in 1939. No one had written anything like it. 10 strangers are brought to an island through a mysterious millionaire’s letter and stranded there, only to find that they’re all hiding secrets they’re desperate to keep hiding. And the body count is rising.

Sound familiar?

It’s basically the plot of One of Us and Twisted Secrets. You trap people with dark secrets in a small space and see what happens.

Or how about the fact that Truly Devious and Stalking are like updated versions of Sherlock Holmes with highly intelligent girls taking it upon themselves to play detective?

Obviously, there is a trope here. Mysteries usually fall into one of those two categories because they’re compelling and entertaining. This is nothing new. People have been following these templates for decades.

So why is this different? Because these books are all trying to pass themselves off as “unsolvable.” They drop very few clues the entire story and when they do, it’s almost always a red herring. (A “red herring” is a clue that is intentionally misleading, pointing you in the wrong direction.) Nearly every mystery novel I’ve ever read involves red herrings, but these have an extraordinary number of them.

The point of these mysteries is to make every character a suspect–which, paradoxically, means none of them is a suspect. You truly have no idea who did it because there are no clues–it’s all about who has the darker motive and that changes all the time.  This can be detrimental to the story because readers know they aren’t going to get answers until the end–so the 300 pages between the beginning of the mystery and The Big Reveal are essentially pointless. This can leave the reader feeling frustrated.  I mean, if you’re trying to pin a murder on 5 different people, then you truly have no suspect.

You’re not going to know what has truly happened until the very end when the killer inevitably has to tell you exactly how and why they did it.  Prior to them telling you exactly what everything means, it is virtually impossible to see it coming. It’s a Scooby Doo mystery without the clues.  Or an episode of The Masked Singer.

These books are all coming out around the same time, and that’s leading to all kinds of comparisons. I read Twisted Secrets a few months ago and now, starting One of Us (which was technically published first), it seems like it’s the exact same story.  There are differences, especially in the writing and how the narrative plays out, but the basic structure is the same. It’s boring.

So…are they all bad?

Of course not.  Truly Devious is high on my list of recommendations for anyone looking for a mystery.  Maureen Johnson does a good job of intertwining multiple mysteries, interesting characters, and actually giving the reader satisfaction throughout. The main mystery might not be solved, but you’re going to get answers to other questions you have.

And I found Twisted Secrets to be a stunning psychological read because the fear and the pain the characters are feeling is very visceral and real.  I couldn’t put it down.

But I am struggling with the other two. While I loved the first Stalking book, I found the sequel to be essentially the same book as the first. It became boring. And One of Us has a slower build than Twisted Secrets and lacks the sharp terror and suspense that drew me in to the latter.

Mysteries are finicky things and while I’m glad they’ve come back into fashion, I’m finding I’m very picky about how exactly the writing crafts the story. There’s a difference between making readers feel like they’re part of process of solving the mystery and making them feel like useless bystanders.

Hunting Prince Dracula (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #2)

First Lines: Our train gnashed its way along frozen tracks toward the white-capped fangs of the Carpathian Mountains. From our position outside Bucharest, the capital of Romania, the peaks were the color of fading bruises.

A week or two after finishing Stalking Jack the Ripper, I put this book on hold at my e-library.  With a 4.31 rating on Goodreads and given my enjoyment of the first book, I was really excited to get my hands on this one.

*Potential Series Spoilers Ahead*

After the horror and heartbreak of the Jack the Ripper case, Audrey Rose needs a fresh start.  Heading from London to Romania with her too-charming-for-his-own-good companion Thomas, Audrey Rose soon learns Romania is no safer than England.  Now, as they journey to join a prestigious forensic science school, they find themselves in the path of another serial killer.  Mimicking the legends of Vlad the Impaler, this killer leaves few clues and many nightmares for those left asking…who is this brutal killer?

I know I’m starting to slip into the “unpopular opinion” category, but I had some problems with this book. Maybe I’m just nitpicking, but it did hurt my enjoyment of this book.

My first problem (and perhaps the biggest for me) was that I’ve figured out The Pattern. I’ve figured out what details are clues or are oddities I need to remember as soon as I read them. I’ve figured out how each clue is really a red herring and it never means what they think it means. I’ve figured out that every character–and therefore, none of them–is suspect.

Momentary interruption: I didn’t figure out the killer before the reveal. So there’s that.

Anyway, I just hated that for most of the book, I felt like I was more in tune with the mystery than the characters were. Whereas I felt like Thomas and Audrey Rose were smarter than me in the last book, I felt like the clever one this time around. That bothered me. The puzzle wasn’t as fun.

I’m also starting to have issues with the portrayal of feminism, which was something I loved last book. Last time, Audrey Rose was this scientific warrior crime solver who also loved big dresses and makeup–and that felt exactly on point. She could do “men’s work” while looking amazing if she wanted to. This time, she’s falling more into the “I’m tough because I wear pants” mentality and, for a story set in 1888, that just didn’t sit well with me. I think Audrey Rose would be a stronger character if she was allowed to be feminine and smart at the same time.

Which leads me to my next, slightly overlapping point. I didn’t feel like Audrey Rose’s character–or Thomas’s for that matter–were as strong this time. Piggybacking on the previous point, I thought Audrey Rose’s personality was contradictory. She’s aggressively aware of reputation and what is respectable. She frequently seems scandalized by the idea of holding Thomas’s hand or being alone with him in a carriage for five minutes–and yet she’s completely fine with breaking with the times and wearing pants or other spoilers I can’t mention? Yes, I know she’s breaking with the times already to be a woman in a man’s ghastly profession, but that’s core to her character. That’s who she is and her goals and ambitions revolve around it for the sole reason that she wants to help people and she wants to understand death. Changing a part of her personality to allow her to wear pants may seem like a little thing, but it’s just one more thing drawing the story away from its historical basis and using the time as a backdrop rather than an integral part of the story.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the whole Dracula angle. I found it to be trite and eye-rollingly boring.

I know I’ve just probably rained on a few parades, but there were a few things I did like. There were moments where the mystery or the suspense was quite exciting. There are scenes that stick out in my memory for one reason or another.

The story is still macabre, if not quite as disgusting (until the end) as the previous book. And I did like that the story didn’t shy away from exploring PTSD in the characters. Audrey Rose endured a lot in the last book and when we catch up to her here, only a few weeks have gone by. She’s not ok. She’s hurting. And we get to see how that affects her. That was a very smart move on the author’s part and I appreciated that.

While this wasn’t my favorite, I will still be checking out the next book. Why not?

Stalking Jack the Ripper (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #1)

First Lines: I placed my thumb and forefinger on the icy flesh, spreading it taut above the breastbone as Uncle had showed me.

This has been high on my to-read list for a long time, but I actually had a hard time getting my hands on it.  It wasn’t until this isolation that I found it on my library’s ebook website and tried it.

Aubrey Rose was born into a world of wealth: fine teas, beautiful dresses, and all the privilege afforded to a girl in the 1880s.  Unfortunately, even that “privilege” is fairly limited and Audrey Rose dreams of bigger things.  She has a secret life working with her uncle on forensic medicine.  She can autopsy a body better than most male medical students her age.  When her work on a few gruesome murders leads her into an investigation of a serial murderer, Audrey searches for answers.  And she may not like what she finds.

You know, it probably wasn’t my brightest idea to read this while the entire world is in a panic, but that doesn’t mean the book wasn’t good.

I’m this on-again-off-again Ripper buff, so I was curious to see what this did with the mystery. Because obviously, it had to solve it even though there wasn’t a solution in real life. And it was…interesting. Some details of the murders were changed to make the plot work, but for the most part it was pretty accurate. (Although it does perpetuate the notion that all those women were prostitutes when they weren’t. Most of them were homeless, jobless, and alcoholics.)

ANYWAY. Our heroine, Audrey Rose, is an interesting lead. She’s fascinated by forensic science and anatomy, which makes her a freak in her social circles. But she’s also a girl who enjoys pretty dresses and cute boys. It was actually really cool to see those seeming opposites in a single character because it reminds us of the stereotypes we see in our heads and how they can be inaccurate. Her sometimes-colleague-sometimes-enemy Thomas is the same way. So those twists on what I immediately imagined were welcome.

The story is obviously dark and gruesome. There are some pretty disgusting details of autopsies, murder scenes, and death. I do much better with these things in books than in movies (because I can’t see them!), but admittedly there were a few times I was like, “Ok, you can back off the details now.” Weak stomachs beware.

I thought the mystery itself and the way things unfolded was really interesting. I was reading the book for large chunks of time because I kept wanting to see what kind of trouble Audrey Rose got into next and how things happened next. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how the series continues.

Serious Moonlight

First Lines: He’d probably forgotten me already.  It was a month ago.  Practically forever.  He definitely wasn’t here tonight.

I’ve only read one other book by Jenn Bennett, and I really enjoyed it.  I was looking forward to this one, which was billed as a mystery and a contemporary romance.

Birdie, a mystery aficionado with an active imagination, feels horribly sheltered.  Raised and homeschooled by overprotective grandparents, Birdie feels isolated from everyone else her age.  The summer before college, she gets a job working graveyard shift at a local hotel.  Through this job, Birdie hopes to bloom into an outgoing girl.  Daniel, the hotel’s nighttime van driver, volunteers to help her.  Daniel shares her sense of adventure and knows of a real mystery taking place at the hotel: a reclusive writer, never seen in public, seems to be having secret meetings there.  To solve the mystery, Birdie will need to come out of her shell…and confront her growing feelings for Daniel.

This was really cute, just as I was hoping it would be. Between the mystery and the romance, there was a lot to like.

Birdie is obsessed with mysteries. She basically wants to be the next Hercule Poirot or Columbo. She cannot resist a mystery, especially when her coworker, Daniel, drops one into her lap. She’s an interesting character in many ways, one of which I don’t want to go into detail about because of how it plays into the plot. But it gave her an interesting twist that I’d never read about before. And Daniel is his own kind of interesting, this enigmatic bubbly budding-magician who works as a van driver at the hotel. I found I had a soft spot for him pretty quickly.

The mystery is not the main focus of the story despite how it’s built up, but that’s ok. The mystery was fine and there’s a cool twist with it, but there were times when Birdie’s obsession got a little out of hand. And the romance wasn’t the main focus of the story either. Generally, there’s just a lot going on for Birdie and she needs the time to deal with each thing. So there’s some family drama going on for her as well.

The book is very light and easy to read. I found it enjoyable just to sit and read even just a few pages when I got the chance and not feel like I was missing anything or loosing the flow of the story. It deals with some heavy topics, but it didn’t make the book a downer at all. I liked that balance.

It’s a quirky little story and I liked how it was full of colorful characters, real issues, and good humor.

All Your Twisted Secrets

First Lines: I spent the last hour wondering if I would die tonight.  You can drop dead from a heart attack at seventeen, right?  The prospect of tonight’s dinner party made my heart ricochet off my rib cage so fiercely I was convinced my days were numbered.

I was lucky enough to have a copy of this ARC and, as a fan of Agatha Christie, especially And Then There Were None, this looked so far up my alley I was bouncing to read this.  (This book officially releases March 17th.)

Six high school seniors are invited to a scholarship dinner, though they don’t seem to have much in common.  A valedictorian, a queen bee, a star athlete, a music geek, a loner, and a stoner.  But for all of them, this dinner turns out to be far different than they expected: it’s a trap.  Suddenly, they are stuck in a room together with a syringe filled with poison, a bomb counting down to zero, and a note saying they need to kill one person or they’re all going to die.  Amber is determined that everyone should get out alive…but what is their connection?  Who wants them dead?  As they begin tracing back their actions, it soon becomes clear that everyone has secrets.  And with the clock ticking down, it all comes down to one question: who is going to die?

The story is what I like to call The Breakfast Club meets Agatha Christie. I really love that it does have that Christie feel to it, where you’re always searching for the smallest clues and it’s full of suspense.

The characters are not exactly the type I generally tend to like. They’re not…heroic, I guess. A couple of them aren’t even good people. But I’m aware that this is a bias I have and I was willing to give the story a fair shake. And honestly, when I stopped looking at each individual action as, “Well that was stupid. Why would they do that?” and started looking at it as teenagers who were desperate for something, then it started to make a lot more sense and I was more sympathetic toward them.

And honestly, these secrets everyone has been keeping? They’re dark. Some are bigger than others, but oh man. This book is gritty and real and dark.

The story is narrated by our music geek, Amber. Her high school isn’t super big, so she’s acquainted with everyone at this dinner. And because her musical abilities are so good, she kind of walks that line between popular and outcast. She was a good choice for narrator because she was so familiar with both sides.

Perhaps what I liked about this book the most was its construction. We’re not in the room the whole story–we’re also shown the events of the last year through Amber’s eyes. The story alternates between the absolute panic of the bomb and what’s happened the last 12 or 13 months. It really built the suspense on both sides of this. Most of the time, I was obviously more anxious to read what happened as the bomb counted down, but there were other events that unfolded outside of that that had my attention. I don’t always see the point of it when stories do that, but this was a necessity.

I like to think myself pretty clever, but this book left me guessing. I mean, I had suspicions from time to time, but there are virtually no clues the whole story. As you get closer to the end, you do start getting hints about things (secrets to be spilled, who’s behind this, etc.) and I certainly did not call it. I actually really enjoyed not being able to figure it out and just getting sucked into the suspense of it all. I haven’t read anything this suspenseful in a while. I had a hard time putting it down to go to bed.

This story has a lot of truths in it. It reveals a lot about human nature and what we’re willing to do to survive, even at the expense of others. It’s psychology in action and I love that.

I really enjoyed this. I can’t wait until everyone can read it!