Book Review :: Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson

Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson
ISBN: 0063293188
Series: Truly Devious #5
Also in this series: Truly Devious, The Vanishing Stair, The Hand on the Wall, The Box in the Woods
on 27 December 2022
Genres: Mystery, Young Adult
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.

Last updated on 9 July 2023

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What is Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson about?

Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson is the 5th instalment of the Truly Devious series and follows Stevie Bell and her motley crew of friends into yet another murder mystery.

This time, Stevie and the crew are in their senior year at Ellingham Acadey, and Stevie finds herself in a bit of disarray. David, her boyfriend, is studying abroad in London and her friends all busying themselves with college applications. So when David extends an invitation for Stevie and her friends to join him in a study-abroad program, they leap at the opportunity (after convincing the school, of course).

“I’ve got a murder mansion, a house full of suspects, a pile of evidence, and nothing.”

In London, they meet Izzy, one of David’s London friends. Izzy introduces them to a cold case from 1995 involving a group of nine friends from Cambridge University. These nine friends, known as “The Nine,” gathered at a country house and engaged in a what-would-become fatal game of drunken hide-and-seek. The morning after, two members of the group were discovered murdered with an axe in the woodshed. (Sounds very Cluedo, right?)

Now faced with seven suspects, two brutal murders, and a killer who continues to play a dangerous game, Stevie can’t help but be drawn into another investigation. As she delves deeper into the secrets of the past, she uncovers a web of deception and intrigue, where everyone seems to have something to hide.

My thoughts on Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson

I really enjoyed Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson. Ever since reading Truly Devious back in 2019 (and claiming it to be one of my favourite books of the year), I have loved following Stevie’s mysterious adventures about the place. I think Truly Devious is probably the best of the series so far, but I have thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

And Nine Liars was no different.

Like all the Truly Devious books, Nine Lairs is told from the present-day with Stevie and her friends, and then flashbacks to the time of the murder, in this case, back to the 1990s with a group of nine friends in a huge manor house. Prior to now, Stevie has been solving cold cases in America, but when the opportunity arises to head across the ditch to England, she’s off. And still intrigued by mysteries. Just now they’re with tea and scones.

“The spaces were wide and wild. And for the first time since this started, she felt a real sense of the danger here.”

I’m not a fan of flashbacks in books. Like, at all. But somehow Johnson writes them in such a way that you really go get engulfed in the back story and almost forget that Stevie is here in the ‘present’ trying to solve something. The stories, both past and present, are very detailed and it’s fun to be able to see the connections between past characters and present ones.

Having said that, Nine Liars, by the nature of the friend group of nine in the 1990s … has a lot of characters. And to be honest, I did struggle to keep up at times. I’m not quite sure why there needed to be so many, though I do understand the nuances that each of them brought to the group’s relationship. Perhaps seven would have sufficed.

Speaking of characters: David is getting on my nerves. Somehow back in Ellingham, he wasn’t so bad, but in the last couple of books he’s been getting more and more annoying and I just want Stevie to be happy instead of faffing around with this guy. I would have actually liked more of Janelle in this book, and Nate, as they’re two of my favourite characters. We didn’t get to see as much of their own skills coming through in this one as we have in past stories, I don’t think.

There’s something about being ‘back’ in London.

As the crew wandered around the streets of England’s capital, I couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic about the place. Even though I never lived there, I was only a few hours away when I did live in England, and I absolutely loved going to London. The setting of the manor house for the Nine (and when Stevie and her friends go back and visit) was very grand, and while still very English, gave a similar vibe to Ellingham Academy in terms of scale and large grounds etc. So that wasn’t lost in this first book abroad. There was just the addition, as I mentioned earlier, of tea.

“This was England. There was always rain in the future.”

According to Goodreads, there’s another book on the way, and I’m glad! I really am enjoying this series by Johnson and don’t feel like it’s getting old yet. I think she may have to work on things such as pace, as I remember The Box in the Woods being a little slow going, too, whether Truly Devious was go-go-go.

No title for book 6 has been released at the time of writing this review on Nine Liars, but I hope it’s soon!

Have you read Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson? What did you think?