One of Us Is Next

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Coming back to Bayview a year later
2. Maeve, Knox and Phoebe
3. Truth or Dare and Vengeance Is Mine
4. When Addy, Bronwyn, Cooper and Nate step back in
5. How the game breaks and who was behind it
6. What worked and what felt creaky
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I did not plan to read One of Us Is Next right away. I liked One of Us Is Lying well enough when I read it in 2019, then left Bayview behind without much thought. A friend who teaches sophomores told me the sequel was the one her students argued about more, because the victims are not the popular kids this time. That stuck with me. I borrowed a copy, expecting a quick follow up. I finished it in four days, mostly late at night, with a pencil stuck in the back for marking who I trusted.

This is the second book in the One of Us Is Lying series by Karen M. McManus. It was published in 2020 by Delacorte Press and runs 384 pages in the hardcover edition with ISBN 9780525707967. The story is set about a year after Simon Kelleher died in detention at Bayview High. Bronwyn Rojas, Nate Macauley, Addy Prentiss and Cooper Clay are still around, but they are no longer the center. The new focus is Maeve Rojas, Knox Myers and Phoebe Lawton, three students who get pulled into a copycat game of Truth or Dare by an unknown texter.

Coming back to Bayview a year later

Bayview High in this book feels tired in a way I believed. Everyone remembers Simon, About That, the trial coverage and the funerals. Teachers watch phones more closely. Parents quote news stories at dinner. The Bayview Four, as the papers called them, are technically cleared, but kids still whisper when Bronwyn walks past. Addy changed her look and her circle. Cooper is trying to play ball with recruiters watching. Nate is trying to stay out of trouble with a record that follows him.

McManus opens with small routines, not a big murder. Maeve checking message boards. Knox on shift at work with his dad gone a lot. Phoebe getting her younger brother Owen ready for school and dealing with a house that feels short on money and sleep. Bayview is not described with long scenery passages. You get it through lunch tables, parking lot chatter, extra shifts, tutoring sessions and the way everyone checks their phones under the desk.

What I found effective here is how the past sits in the background without long recaps. Simon built About That with Janae Vargas. He died after drinking peanut oil in detention. That weight makes the new texter scary fast.

The first messages are short. I am not Simon, but I know what you did. Then comes the name for the game. Truth or Dare. Pick one. If you refuse, your secret posts anyway.

Maeve, Knox and Phoebe

Maeve Rojas is Bronwyn's younger sister. She had leukemia as a small child, which still shapes how her parents watch her. She is sharp, dry, good at research and tired of being treated as fragile. She takes medication, misses some school for checkups and spends a lot of time online looking up facts other people skip. Her friendship with Knox feels real to me because it is built on teasing and homework help, not big speeches. Her tie to Bronwyn is warm but edged. Bronwyn loves her and also hovers. Maeve loves Bronwyn and also wants room to make her own mistakes.

Knox Myers is the quiet builder type. He works with his family, shows up for his younger sisters when he can and has a crush he does not handle well. He once had a thing with Sandeep, a girl from school, and it ended badly enough that he still winces thinking about it. He is close to his friend Luis. He is not a star athlete or a brain in the Bronwyn sense. He is steady, a little awkward, the kid who fixes things. I liked his chapters best early on because he notices work details. Who pays for gas. Who covers a shift. Who lies to a parent about where they were.

Phoebe Lawton is the most exposed of the three. She lives with her mom and her little brother Owen in a smaller house after her dad died. Money is tight. She works at a cafe, picks up Owen from school, tries to keep grades up while her mom works long hours. At school she dates Brandon Weber for a while, a rich kid with a loud group, because attention feels good when home is stressful. Her best friend Jules is blunt and loyal in the way that can tip into pushy. Phoebe has secrets she has not told even Jules, about Brandon, about a night at a party, about what her family owes and who helped them.

None of them starts as a suspect in a crime. They start as kids with normal messes. Bad decisions at parties. Money trouble. Family illness. A crush handled badly. That ordinariness is why the texter gets traction. Everyone in Bayview has something they would pay to keep quiet.

The three voices rotate in short chapters, and McManus keeps their vocab distinct enough that I rarely flipped back to check whose head I was in.

Truth or Dare and Vengeance Is Mine

The game itself is simple and cruel. The texter calls itself Vengeance Is Mine in some messages and signs off with dares that sound like orders. Pick truth and you get asked something you cannot answer honestly without getting hurt. Pick dare and you get told to do something risky in public. Refuse and the texter posts a little proof that you are hiding something.

At first the dares look like pranks. Knox gets told to confront a teacher. Maeve gets pushed to admit something about her health she keeps private. Phoebe gets told to mess with Brandon's car or show up somewhere she does not want to be. Kids film them. Clips spread. Teachers punish the kids on camera, not the number behind it.

Then the scale shifts. Phoebe is told to kiss a boy at a party she barely knows. Knox is told to damage property tied to his work. Maeve is told to steal files from the school office. Each dare is set where phones will be out. Each truth option would expose someone they love. So they take the dare, as the texter expects. Always take the dare becomes a sort of joke among students, until it stops being funny.

What makes this section work is the group chat logic. Classmates egg each other on. The school tries an assembly about online safety, which lands flat because the kids have heard it before.

I kept thinking about how McManus shows proof culture. The texter never posts a full secret at first, only a corner of it. A photo cropped tight. A receipt. A line from a message. Just enough so the target knows the texter has more. That is more frightening than a full dump, and it keeps Maeve up at night doing reverse searches while Bronwyn tells her to stop.

By the middle of the book, the dares cause real harm. A fire at a party. A fight in the parking lot. A kid in the hospital. Brandon dies at one of these gatherings, and suddenly Truth or Dare is not a prank. Police come back to Bayview High with notebooks out. Reporters park outside again. And Maeve, Knox and Phoebe realize the texter wanted them isolated before it wanted them scared.

When Addy, Bronwyn, Cooper and Nate step back in

Fans of book one get a lot of the old crew here, though McManus keeps them in support roles.

Addy Prentiss has changed most. She cut her hair, left Jake, works, takes classes and tries to stay out of gossip. She sees Phoebe getting pulled into Brandon's orbit and recognizes the pattern from her own time with Jake. Her scenes with Phoebe are among the best in the book, because Addy does not lecture. She asks plain questions. Does he check your phone. Does he decide who you eat with. Phoebe lies at first, then stops lying, then hates Addy a little for being right.

Bronwyn is now with Nate, stressing about college while trying to protect Maeve without smothering her. She brings a lawyer mindset to the texts, saving screenshots and telling Maeve not to delete anything.

Cooper Clay is playing and dealing with press that still mentions his personal life more than his pitching. Nate works and helps Knox think through what not to say to police without a parent present.

Their return does two things for the plot. It gives the new trio people who believe them fast, because the older four know how crazy Bayview can get. It also raises the stakes, because the texter starts using old secrets as bait. Messages reference Simon, Janae, Jake, the missing EpiPens. Someone in town is keeping the past alive on purpose.

How the game breaks and who was behind it

This is where I have to spoil the mechanics, because a summary should explain the reveal.

The texter is not one lonely kid. It is a small group with linked motives, using shared phones and timed posts to look like one voice. The dares point back to kids close to Brandon and to Phoebe's circle who felt wronged and invisible. Jules plays a larger part than she first admits. She resents Phoebe pulling away toward Brandon and rich kids, resents being the sidekick, and gets pulled into helping run the game. Other helpers pass along photos, lend accounts, start rumors to cover tracks.

The motive mixes revenge, jealousy and grief. One helper lost standing after Simon's story and wants Bayview to feel scared again. Another wants money and uses secrets to get it. Another wants to protect a sibling and thinks scaring Phoebe will push her away from Brandon. None of them plans for Brandon to die at first, as I read it. His death at the party, tied to a dare involving drinking and a confrontation, forces the group to cover up harder, which makes the texts meaner and sloppier.

Maeve figures out a lot of this by following small tech clues, with help from Bronwyn and from a boy named Luis who knows Knox. Timestamps that do not line up. Photos taken from angles only certain kids could get. A dare that repeats a phrase Jules used at lunch. Knox realizes one dare required knowledge of his work schedule that only a few people had. Phoebe realizes someone knew about her dad's debts and about Owen's school pickup times, which narrows the field fast.

The final confrontation happens at school and at the police station, not in a big chase. Screenshots, saved chats, a phone left in a locker, a parent who finally checks a credit card bill. The police arrest those directly tied to threats and to Brandon's death. Jules has to face what she did. Phoebe has to tell the truth about that night with Brandon and about what she saw. Knox has to admit what he broke and pay for it. Maeve has to tell her parents how sick she felt keeping secrets while trying to solve everything herself.

What worked and what felt creaky

I liked the idea more than the execution in places, and that is worth saying plainly.

What worked: the school feels real. The tired teachers, the assembly that fails, the parents who take phones and think the problem is solved. The money stress in Phoebe's house is drawn with care. Packing lunches, counting tips, asking a neighbor to watch Owen. Knox at work with sore hands. Maeve timing meds around tests. Those details kept me reading when the mystery stalled.

Addy as a mentor figure also worked. She is the only one of the original four who really changes how she talks to younger girls, and her growth feels earned. Bronwyn and Nate are steady but less surprising. Cooper gets less page time than I wanted.

What felt creaky: the new trio never quite crackle the way the first book's four did. Maeve is fun to follow when she researches, but her health storyline sometimes pauses the plot for recaps. Knox is sweet and a little flat until late, when guilt sharpens him. Phoebe carries the most weight and gets the most sympathy, but her choices around Brandon repeat beats we already saw with Addy and Jake. I wished McManus had given Phoebe a sharper edge earlier, instead of saving her anger for the last sixty pages.

The twist machinery also groans a bit. Too many helpers, too many borrowed phones, too many dares that require perfect timing by teens with homework. One or two reveals land well, especially the Jules turn and the money angle tied to Phoebe's dad. The rest felt stacked to keep suspects rotating. The Brandon death scene, which should hit hard, gets crowded by filming angles and who texted whom at 11:14.

Still, I closed the book satisfied. It respects what came before without copying it. It shows how Bayview learned the wrong lessons from Simon, treating every phone as a weapon and every secret as content. It lets Maeve choose honesty with her sister even when honesty costs her privacy. It lets Knox own a mistake at work instead of hiding behind friends. It lets Phoebe walk away from a boy who treated her as an accessory and toward friends who argue with her honestly.

If you read book one for the mystery, read this for the aftermath. It is longer than it needs to be in the middle, and the final tally of who sent what takes notes to follow. But Phoebe making school lunches for Owen while her mom sleeps after a night shift, Knox wiping down tables after closing, Maeve saving every screenshot in a folder labeled for Bronwyn: those small images stayed with me more than the texter name. I would hand this to a teen who likes school thrillers with romance on the side and who does not mind a slower build to a loud last act.

FAQ

When was One of Us Is Next published and how long is it?

It was published in 2020 by Delacorte Press. The hardcover runs 384 pages and is listed with ISBN 9780525707967.

Is One of Us Is Next part of a series?

Yes, it is book two in the One of Us Is Lying series. It follows Maeve Rojas, Knox Myers and Phoebe Lawton after the first book focused on Bronwyn, Nate, Addy and Cooper.

Do you need to read One of Us Is Lying first?

It helps but is not required. The book recaps Simon, About That and Jake, and the new trio carries the main game.