Such Charming Liars Sees Karen McManus Spin a Different Kind of Teen Thriller
Author Karen McManus is one of the young adult genre’s most popular (and prolific) authors. The reigning queen of teen thrillers, she’s penned stories about everything from a murderous riff on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (You’ll Be the Death of Me) to a teen-baed true crime investigation (Nothing More to Tell). But she’s probably best known for her One of Us Is Lying series, a trilogy that helped to define contemporary ideas of what YA thrillers are supposed to be and do. Thanks in large part to that story of the kids in Bayview, McManus has achieved the kind of success that means it would be beyond easy for her to turn out a copycat story every few years or so. That she consistently refuses to do so is fairly remarkable, a fact that is once again in evidence with her latest book, Such Charming Liars.
As much a family drama as it is a thriller, Such Charming Liars if anything, probably feels closest to McManus’s The Cousins in terms of character dynamics. But that’s where many of the similarities end. A darker tale than most of her previous works, there’s a sense of palpable danger throughout its pages and every one of its characters is some shade of morally gray. Even most of the adults are untrustworthy to some degree or other, and none of the parents or other adults are particularly reassuring as authority figures.
Such Charming Liars follows the story of Kat, a young jewel thief in training who lives with her mother, Jamie, and her grandmother figure, Gem, who also happens to be the head of their little mini-crime ring making detailed fakes and fencing stolen goods. Determined to get out of the family business and give her daughter a more normal life, Jamie agrees to pull one last heist: stealing an expensive necklace from the ritzy complex of the billionaire Sutherland family and swapping it with a forgery. Kat sneaks along for the ride, determined to use her street smarts to help her mom succeed. However, their plans are thrown into chaos when they unexpectedly run into Luke, Jamie’s ex-husband whom she married during a whirlwind Vegas fling a decade ago and then divorced two days afterward. And with him is his son, Liam, the stepbrother Kat never thought she’d see again.
Liam, for his part, has been living with his father since his mother passed away six months prior, keeping himself occupied by trying to spoil his dad’s many Tinder Swindler-style dating scams. (Jamie really dodged a bullet, is what I’m saying.) But with his dad now seemingly in a relationship with billionaire Ross Sutherland’s daughter Annalise, Liam’s been dragged to the family compound to play happy families in the hopes that his presence will make Luke look more like a stand-up sort of guy. When they’re thrown together once more after one of the Sutherlands turns up dead, Liam and Kat, along with Ross’s grandson Augustus find themselves trapped in a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a ruthless killer (and at the mercy of many family secrets).
Such Charming Liars represents a fairly significant swerve for McManus as an author. The story is primarily a heist drama with a murder mystery on top and, as such, immediately feels as though it skews older than some of her previous efforts. And though the book’s two protagonists are joined by their unique family history, they’re both on their own emotional journies that don’t necessarily have all that much to do with one another. Also, in another welcome change, the pair are not love interests. And the still-sweet platonic bond they share makes for a delightfully refreshing change in a genre space that loves to pair its characters off romantically.
At its heart a story of dysfunctional families, Such Charming Liars doesn’t pull its punches either, featuring subplots involving domestic violence, child neglect, and alcoholism. Many of the adults are selfish and cruel, and even Kat and Liam aren’t entirely innocent, thanks to their various levels of involvement or complicity in their parents’s illicit activities. T
Thankfully, the relationship between the two former step-siblings is warm and realistic, and while it’s perhaps incorrect to call them a “found family” since they were briefly related through marriage, the vibes mimic the best of that type of story. Both are lonely, clearly in need of friends, and largely isolated thanks to their parents…let’s just call them less than traditional career and/or lifestyle choices. It’s lovely to see that their bond, forged during their brief time as a family, not only still exists, but flourishes once they’re reunited. (It also doesn’t hurt that Liam is basically a human cinnamon roll.) Their group chemistry with bougie, snarky Augustus is also excellent, and his initial distrust of the chaos that seems to follow Kat around is…well, honestly pretty relatable.
If the book has a weakest link, it’s probably the adult characters. From Jamie and Luke to Annalise and her siblings, the grown-ups are fairly flat and one-dimensional, not only allowing their children to run roughshod over them but behaving in the sort of immature way that barely distinguishes them from the kids they’re supposed to be raising. McManus has always been better at writing teens than the grown-ups around them, and while the adults of Such Charming Liars are for the most part fine, the various betrayals they commit and secrets they hide are largely choices necessitated by the ongoing plot than by any specific character arcs.
Still, the pace is brisk, the story propulsive, and the book’s final third is filled with twists, most of which you’re unlikely to see coming. And the story’s ending is wrapped up in a way that feels satisfying, but still leaves the door a little open should McManus decide she wants to write another story with these characters. I know I wouldn’t mind seeing what comes next for all of them, both separately and together.
Such Charming Liars is available now, wherever books are sold.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB