One of Us Is Lying

Pip reopens a schoolgirl's murder as a project, only to discover that people have reasons to keep the accepted answer intact. A Good Girl's Guide to Murder gives a teen investigator the same distrust of easy labels that drives the Bayview mystery. McManus rotates among students who are suspects; Jackson follows one determined researcher through interviews and records. The case becomes increasingly dangerous and grows darker across its series. Start here if assembling clues mattered more to you than the detention-room group dynamic.

Stevie attends Ellingham Academy partly because she wants to solve an old kidnapping. A present-day death makes the puzzle urgent again. Truly Devious has a closed school setting and a young sleuth reading the past against what everyone says now, but its mystery unfolds across a trilogy rather than tying itself to one detention period and four exposed secrets. Choose it for long-form clue work across two timelines, eccentric classmates, and the way an institution's history can shape a new crime.

Ellery moves to a small town with a history of vanished girls, where a new threat suggests the pattern is not over. McManus again uses teen relationships and withheld local history to keep motives shifting. Two Can Keep a Secret is a separate story, not another Bayview case, and it places more weight on the town's older crimes than on a group of students all under immediate suspicion. Read it if you want the author's pace and twist-making with a fresh cast and setting.

Three cousins barely know one another when their estranged grandmother invites them to work at her island resort. They arrive to find a family puzzle with consequences none of their parents explained. The Cousins shares One of Us Is Lying's alternating young perspectives and the suspicion that every person is protecting a different version of events. Its mystery is inheritance and family history rather than a classmate's death. Choose it for McManus's ensemble structure with more generational secrets and less school-life pressure.

Five years after a high-school cheerleading squad suffered a series of deaths, Monica begins finding reasons to doubt the story everyone accepted. The Cheerleaders offers the small community, teenage investigator, and buried secrets that Bayview readers may want again. Kara Thomas leans harder into grief and danger, and her protagonist examines an older pattern rather than defending herself as a current suspect. Pick it when the aftermath of a crime and the damage to a school matter more than a clever detention-room setup.