About the Author
Karen M. McManus is an American young adult author best known for One of Us Is Lying (2017), a murder mystery set in a high school detention where one of the five students present dies, and each of the remaining four had a motive. The novel debuted to significant critical and commercial success and has been compared to Agatha Christie for its plot construction and to John Hughes for its high school social dynamics. McManus worked as a copywriter before publishing her debut novel, which became a New York Times and international bestseller.
McManus has continued to write YA thrillers including Two Can Keep a Secret (2019), One of Us Is Next (2020), The Cousins (2020), Nothing More to Tell (2022), and You'll Be the Death of Me (2021). One of Us Is Lying was adapted as a television series for Peacock (2021–2022). Her books consistently feature ensemble casts of teenagers navigating secrets, social hierarchies, and the gap between public personas and private realities. She is one of the most commercially successful YA thriller authors of the 2010s–2020s, recommended alongside Holly Jackson's A Good Girl's Guide to Murder and Jennifer Lynn Barnes's The Inheritance Games.