Teen genre fiction can so easily be awash with cliches and stereotypes, and she manages to disrupt them. It’s a small gripe: McManus keeps the juicy subplots ticking over and drip-feeds reveals as clinically as an IV tube. Although both books are told by a revolving cast of first-person narrators, everyone’s interior monologue sounds the same. Hell?!”), but it is used indiscriminately.

Like its predecessor, One of Us Is Next suffers from one drawback: the dialogue is certainly snappy (“The. Untangling the shifting matrix of allegiances are fatherless Phoebe Maeve, the tech-savvy leukemia survivor whose cancer is in remission (or not, as her nosebleeds start up again) and Knox, Maeve’s ex, currently interning with Eli. This small town is alive with clandestine hook-ups, feckless or uncommunicative parents and resentments, and what seemed like a tragic accident starts to look like foul play. In One of Us Is Next, the narrative engine is a high-stakes game of truth or dare, conducted by text. In the first book, a gossip app spread misery and resentment. As before, an anonymous sadist is trying to manipulate people, with fatal consequences. Everyone is still reeling from recent events when rumour, deceit and death stalk the student body again. Maeve is the younger sister of Bronwyn, the star of the first book Eli Kleinfelter, the crusading lawyer, is back with his own plot. The focus shifts to a handful of characters, many of whom are familiar.

After a diversion to another town in 2018’s Two Can Keep a Secret, McManus has returned to Bayview High.

One of us is next book series