The following version of the novel was used to create this study guide: McManus, Karen. One of Us is Next. Delacorte Press, Ja inuary 7, 2020. Kindle.

One of Us is Next, by Karen M. McManus, is the sequel to One of Us is Lying, In this installment, it is 18 months after Simon Kelleher orchestrated his own death and framed four Bayview students. Another student is now dead. Was the death the result of carelessness or a prank gone wrong? Or, was Brandon Weber, a star baseball player, targeted?

Phoebe Lawton does not think her life can get much worse after her father dies in a freak accident at work. Then, she is chosen as the first player in a game of Truth or Dare proposed through text messages to the students. Because Phoebe does not respond to the unknown person who sent the text, he reveals to the entire school population that Phoebe had slept with her sister’s boyfriend. Phoebe’s sister, Emma, confronts Phoebe about the rumor, appearing to be upset by the news. She orders Phoebe to stay away from her.

As time passes, Phoebe notices her normally studious sister becoming more and more distant. She is even drinking to excess. Phoebe believes her sister is upset about more than just the fact Phoebe had slept with her boyfriend, especially since Emma and the boyfriend, Derek, had broken up before Phoebe even met Derek. One evening when Phoebe arrives home from school, Emma has drunk so much that she has passed out and is convulsing. Phoebe calls an ambulance, and Emma is admitted to the hospital.

Meanwhile, the texting game Truth or Dare progresses through several rounds, but then mysteriously stops when Brandon dies after he jumps down onto a landing in an abandoned construction site. Students regularly cut through the site so it was not immediately suspicious that Brandon and some other students were there. However, as the accident site is investigated more closely, it appears that the support system of the landing had been tampered with, perhaps the reason why Brandon had fallen through the landing.

Knox Meyers, a student at Bayview, happened to be cutting through the site just after Brandon fell. Sean Murdock, a baseball player and Brandon’s best friend, hit Knox hard enough to cause a concussion and make Knox forget what he had seen. Regardless, Knox does not think the story Sean told about Brandon’s death made sense. Sean claims he hit Knox because he ran toward the ledge. Knox not only had grown up around construction and knew not to do that, but he is also afraid of heights. He would not have run toward a ledge under any condition.

Knox teams up with his friend, Maeve Rojos, to find out what really happened. They manage to get their hands on a video from Sean’s phone taken the day of Brandon’s death. The video and audio footage suggest that Brandon was jumping because he had received a dare to do so. Meanwhile, a strange man had been paying visits to the cafe where Phoebe works as a waitress, looking for her. He finally left her a threatening letter suggesting that Phoebe should know him and asking her to meet him. When Knox sees the font used to write the letter, he connects it to the threatening letters that Eli Kleinfelter, the lead lawyer at the law firm where Knox is interning, has been receiving.

Knox and Maeve track the letters to Jared Jackson, a teen whose brother was put in prison by Eli. They follow Jared one night and are stunned when he drives to the restaurant where Eli’s wedding rehearsal is being held. Jared leaves a backpack, which is later discovered to contain a pressure cooker bomb, under the deck where the wedding party is gathered. Knox and Maeve retrieve the bomb and get it away from the group, saving their lives.

At the hospital, Phoebe learns what has happened to her friends. Many of them have been brought to the emergency room for minor injuries, so she visits with them in the waiting room until her mother calls her back to Emma’s hospital room. A police officer is waiting for Phoebe. He claims that Jared said he was working with Phoebe to kill Brandon and Eli. They had made a revenge pact. Jared claimed that Phoebe wanted Brandon dead because she learned he had been at work with his father the day her father died. Brandon had been playing with the forklift that jammed, causing Phoebe’s father’s death. Brandon had never been punished for his role in the accident, so Phoebe wanted him to pay.

Emma finally speaks up from her hospital bed and says that she is the one who contacted Jared. She had used Phoebe’s name. She claims at one point she had wanted Brandon to pay for what he had done to their father, but when she saw what the game was doing to people, she told Jared to shut it down. She had started drinking when the game continued and Brandon died.

Later, Emma’s lawyer sits down with her and shows her the transcripts of her text conversations with Jared. Emma and Phoebe both realize who was communicating with Jared when they see the word “bizarre” spelled incorrectly. Phoebe had been coaching their brother, Owen, for a spelling bee when he misspelled that word in the same way, spelling it “bazaar.” In a silent pact, Emma and Phoebe, choose not to reveal that their younger brother had continued the game. The novel ends with Emma asking her lawyer if it can ever really be proven from whom the texts came.