Nine Liars

Stevie Bell's final year at Ellingham Academy is off to a rough start. Her boyfriend, David, is studying in London, her friends are consumed by college applications, and the famous cold case she spent so long on has finally been solved. With nothing left to chew on, her mind keeps circling bigger questions about her future, about love, and about what comes next.

An invitation from David offers an escape. Stevie and her friends can join him abroad for a stretch of study, and soon after she arrives, his new friend Izzy tells her about an unsolved case from England's past. In 1995, a group of nine friends from Cambridge University spent a weekend at a country house and ended the night with a drunken game of hide-and-seek. By the next day, two of them were dead in the woodshed, killed with an ax.

The police settled on a burglary that turned violent, and the case was set aside. But one of the seven survivors has never stopped thinking about what she saw that night, and it does not fit the official story. If she is right, there was no intruder, and somebody who was in that house has been lying for decades.

Maureen Johnson, author of the Truly Devious series, sends Stevie across the Atlantic for a stand-alone mystery that mixes tension with plenty of humor. There are seven suspects, two murders, and a killer who may still be playing the game.