Title: Nine Liars
Author: Maureen Johnson
Series: Truly Devious
About this book: Senior year at Ellingham Academy for Stevie Bell isn’t going well. Her boyfriend, David, is studying in London. Her friends are obsessed with college applications. With the cold case of the century solved, Stevie is adrift. There is nothing to distract her from the questions pinging around her brain—questions about college, love, and life in general.
Relief comes when David invites Stevie and her friends to join him for study abroad, and his new friend Izzy introduces her to a double-murder cold case. In 1995, nine friends from Cambridge University went to a country house and played a drunken game of hide-and-seek. Two were found in the woodshed the next day, murdered with an axe.
The case was assumed to be a burglary gone wrong, but one of the remaining seven saw something she can’t explain. This was no break-in. Someone’s lying about what happened in the woodshed.
Seven suspects. Two murders. One killer still playing a deadly game.
This is the fifth book in the Truly Devious series, and I have yet to be bored by a single moment of any of them. In fact, these are books I read again and again, and there was something about this cast of characters, involved in this crime that was so ridiculously entertaining to me.
The Nine are an entertaining comedy troop who feel they should exist in a time even longer ago than 1995, but rather the 60s when Monty Python reigned supreme. Each one of them is a character with a capital C, none of them allowing the reader or Stevie to relegate them to the background of the mystery, or their own lives. They were people I could vividly picture in my mind as I read about them, along with the estate. Their arguments and love lives seemed pitch perfect for the time they spent their youth in (sorry, I’m Team Oasis, not Blur). They are no less interesting when they appear again in the 2020s, as I was quite interested to see where they would end up after that fateful night.
The Ellingham Academy group remain some of my favourite characters who happen to be teenagers, with a nervous Stevie leading the pack in a way that anyone who has to figure out what they need to do for the rest of their lives can. I empathize. No one should have to figure that out that early in life. While there wasn’t enough of Janelle and Vi for me boy was there a lot of Nate, and he is as helpful, dry and witty as ever.
These characters are close to my heart, this mystery felt like a classic and I cannot wait to see what happens next.
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