Five people find themselves in detention together. From the surface, they’re about as different as can be: the jock, the geek, the criminal, the spoilt princess and the loner.

But when the loner dies from a huge allergic reaction to peanut oil, suddenly the focus is on the other four in the room. The loner, Simon, had a website where he published sallacious gossip about the whole school, and it seems like he had dirt on each of the four in the room that was due to be published within 24 hours of his death. Not just your ordinary gossip, but things that could ruin their lives. Pretty big motive, right?

As the scrutiny of the police bears down on the remaining four, they find that they’re not all as different as they originally thought. And rather than turning on each other to take the heat away from themselves, close friendships are formed in the most unlikely places.

I have to say, I really didn’t expect the ending at all. The book was told from all four different perspectives and it switched often, which meant you could never feel too attached to one person’s thoughts before you were in the mind of someone else.

[Potential spoiler alerts from here downwards]

Pretty quickly, I got the feeling that none of the 4 were guilty, but the twist at the end was completely out of the blue! I had in my head a specific person who I thought was the culprit, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Usually I would have expected my predictions to change, but everything I read seemed to point more and more towards them. Alas not. Well played Ms McManus!

But more than just being delighted by the surprise twists, what impressed me more was the character development and the fact that I could relate to each and every character. And the way that this horrible situation caused each of them to grow and develop throughout the book made me even more attached to them, to the point when there were times I was truly convinced that this book was going to break my heart!

I can definitely see this being made into a film at some point in the near future…