Nine Liars

Locations
Call Number: Teen Fiction / Johnson, Maureen, Teen Book / Fiction / Mystery / Johnson, Maureen
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Teen, 1st Floor 4-week checkout	Teen Fiction / Johnson, Maureen	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Teen Books 4-week checkout	Teen Book / Fiction / Mystery / Johnson, Maureen	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Teen Books 4-week checkout	Teen Book / Fiction / Mystery / Johnson, Maureen	4-week checkout	Reshelving
Pittsfield Teen Books 4-week checkout	Teen Book / Fiction / Mystery / Johnson, Maureen	4-week checkout	Due 05-21-2024
Westgate Teen Books 4-week checkout	Teen Book / Fiction / Mystery / Johnson, Maureen	4-week checkout	Due 05-13-2024

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 ax. 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.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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Summary / Annotation
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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Pretty good, not spectacular submitted by Gillerdeer on July 14, 2023, 9:20am I'm a big fan of the Truly Devious series. This book is number 5, so by this point the characters are familiar and so are the general tropes of the series. One really nice thing about Nine Liars (which is also true of The Box in the Woods) is that it's a standalone mystery -- so no mystery-related cliffhangers that leave you waiting for another book. The biggest drawback for me (and this also applies to The Box in the Woods) is that the mystery doesn't feel as fun and exciting without the backdrop of the enigmatic Ellingham Academy. This mystery takes place while Stevie (the main character and detective) is visiting her boyfriend in England. I understand that it would be forced to have murders keep happening at Ellingham, so there's not much that can be done about this complaint. But without the mysterious setting, there's a bit of intrigue that's lacking.

Now a bit more discussion of the actual content of the book. One big draw of this book (and the series in general) is that we see both Stevie's brilliance and self-doubt when solving the mystery. I love that she is every bit as talented as any stuffy old British detective, and yet unlike with those standard and often very self-assured characters, we see so much behind-the-scenes of Stevie questioning herself and her abilities. She is a very relatable character. I'm hoping that as she gets more confident, she learns to trust her abilities more.

This mystery itself is pretty good -- I found it a bit hard to follow all of the many characters in the mystery, since there's not all that much time spent on them and they all kind of blur into one another. But everything ties together in a satisfying conclusion (though nothing mind-blowing, in my opinion).

This book also shows the continuation of Stevie's relationship with David and her friendships with Janelle, Nate, and Vi. Personally, I find Stevie's and David's relationship pretty annoying and immature. But I'm an adult reading YA, so probably to be expected. I also find Stevie's constant testing of her friends' limits throughout the series (including this book) to be hard to read. She can definitely be inconsiderate at times, and there's certainly more of her shenanigans in this book. But I'm glad her friends do hold her accountable at least.

The group was applying to college in this book, so hopefully in the next book there will be an interesting new college setting for the next mystery!