Nine Liars is an ingenious continuation of one of the all-time best YA mystery series ever.
It is no secret that I adore the Truly Devious series with my whole heart. The way this series has grown and adapted is brilliant, with these new stories adding so much more to our characters and their development over the series. Johnson keeps adding these new layers that enrich your reading experience, particularly in superb character work and these incredibly well-plotted mysteries.
Maureen Johnson’s work just always hits that sweet spot for me. There’s that sense of cosy crime, a familiarity and a comfort to the characters and the world. It is genuinely like a modern day Agatha Christie, but way more diverse and updated to suit our world now. Johnson has that touch of something so special and unique, but also always with a sense of something so fresh and new. She is just impeccable at constructing overarching plots that will totally destroy your mind and everything you thought you knew. Though Stevie and the gang may have moved away from the Truly Devious case, I would love to continue reading about their exploits evermore. Every book offers a totally original and fascinating mystery, while continuing to develop these characters and relationships we have come to know and love.
Stevie Bell is an icon. This has already been clearly established. She’s Sherlock Holmes for the Instagram generation, with a discerning wit and a mind that moves at a million miles an hour. Her powers of observation are mind-blowing and watching her piece together the puzzle, or reveal everything in a lengthy speech is endlessly entertaining. That classic denouement and unveiling of every last detail is always a moment that makes me drop my book in shock. Minor details you had not picked up on earlier become earth-shattering revelations. Nine Liars is no exception to this rule, with an exceptional finale that had me staying up into the early hours to complete. Of course, she is joined by a stellar cast of supporting characters, all of whom have grown so much since their first introduction. It feels like settling back with old friends and that tension of evolving and moving on is one that drives a lot of character dynamics here. There is a natural end in sight to their days spent together, with university looming, and Johnson threads in those fears of being left behind or not quite knowing where your future lies perfectly.
Johnson always makes setting play such an important part in the story, almost becoming its own character. This is such a quintessentially British mystery. I loved all the English references, though they are very much with an American tourist gloss on them. The bubble of London is burst with a rustic countryside estate, complete with an unsolved murder to boot. Of course, I ate it up! For me, it felt like a love letter to the Golden Age of Crime and the British cosy crime mysteries that Johnson is inheriting from. There are plenty of meta references and woven in tropes, though these are often challenged and undermined. The homage is clearly there but Johnson never takes the easy route. Instead, you are lured in with that sense of familiarity, but nothing is ever as it seems in the world of Truly Devious.
Nine Liars is essential reading for anyone who enjoys a good old fashioned mystery, but with a distinctively modern twist. Prepare for Johnson to fool you all over again.
Nine Liars is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of December 27th 2022.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
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.
