One of us may be an Unreliable Narrator

 My employer sends out $25 gift certificates for anniversaries and birthdays, so last year I used one to buy Karen M. McManus's One of Us is Lying. 

My initial impression on reading it, which our murder victim Simon points out not long before dying is that it's The Breakfast Club, only Ally Sheedy dies 10 minutes in, and we spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out if it was Judd, Molly, Emilio, or Anthony who put peanut oil in her water. 

See, the set up here is that 5 high school stereotypes wind up in detention due to a teacher finding cell phones in their backpacks. We have Bronwyn, on her way to Valedictorian; Addy, who's popular and dating an athlete; Nate, who sells pills and weed as a side hustle; Cooper, a popular baseball player; and Simon, the outcast who runs About That, a Tumblr gossip site about the goings on at Bayside High School outside San Diego. (So, add Gossip Girl to the mix.) Towards the start of detention, several things happen. A car crash in the parking lot distracts everyone. Simon gets thirst, can't find his water bottle, and winds up using a chemistry glass to get water from the sink. And promptly goes into anaphylaxis. Someone runs to the nurse's office and finds that all the EpiPens are missing. Simon dies. 

Our 4 narrators become suspects in his murder after it comes out the vial had peanut oil in it (Simon had a peanut allergy) and a pending post from Simon reveals that Simon was getting really to expose rather damaging gossip about the other 4. (Bronwyn cheated to pass Chemistry, Addy slept with someone besides her boyfriend, Nate is still dealing while on probation, and Cooper has been juicing. All but one of those are true, although the lie gets exposed when someone breaks the encryption on what was supposed to go up.) To top it all off, someone keeps posting the the Tumblr detail on how the murder went down. 

Much like the Breakfast Club, the walls between our central characters come down as the year progresses, as they learn more about each other. However, as the title states, we're trying to figure out which of them is not telling the truth. 

As YA fiction, it works well, giving us the standard sanitized version of High School life, although that has changed quite a bit since I graduated. (I realize Christopher Pike, R L Stein, and J. K. Rowling all have their various issues, their YA fiction did a lot to bring YA fiction out of deathly dull morality plays.) As a mystery, it also works well, even if it doesn't quite get to the paranoia and claustrophobia that Dame Agatha managed to get in a few of hers in a similar vein. I mean, of the twists in here, one I had figured out early on, mainly because I knew the phrasing from personal experience, but the resolution I had thought early on then discarded, although the second part I had not foreseen. 

Honestly, I enjoyed reading it, and the solution and resolution fit the narrative, which is always good in any kind of mystery.