Review of Nothing More to Tell

This popular YA thriller writer has released a new book about a friend group that was involved in a murder. What did I think? Check out my review of Nothing More to Tell by Karen M. McManus. I’m putting this one on my list of best Boarding School fiction!

Nothing More to Tell by Karen M. Mc Manus

Published on August 30, 2022 by Delacorte Books.

I checked this book out of the library.

Synopsis: Four years ago, Brynn left Saint Ambrose School following the shocking murder of her favorite teacher. The case was never solved, but she’s sure that the three kids who found Mr. Larkin’s body know more than they’re telling, especially her ex-best friend Tripp Talbot. He’s definitely hiding something.

When Brynn gets an internship working on a popular true-crime show, she decides to investigate what really happened that day in the woods. But the further she dives into the past, the more secrets she finds.

Four years ago someone got away with murder. Now it’s time to uncover the truth.

What Else has Karen McManus Written? Karen M. McManus books in order

If you read any YA, you probably know her for One of Us Is Lying (2017) her debut book with a Breakfast Club feel. In that book, a group of kids (a brain, a jock, a queen bee, an outsider, and a rebel) are sent to detention and one of them ends up dead. This clever Locked Room Mystery helped make YA thrillers popular.

After that, McManus wrote a standalone, Two Can Keep a Secret (2019).

She followed that with a companion book to One of Us is Lying called One of Us Is Next (2020). (This is a very loose “series” set in the same story works and the third book in the series, One of Us is Back, comes out in 2023.)

After that came three standalones: The Cousin (2020), You’ll Be the Death of Me (2021), and Such Charming Liars (2024)

Review of Nothing More to Tell (2022)

For those of you who don’t know, I was a YA reviewer for years before I switched over to reviewing adult books.

As a lifelong thriller reader, I have always found young adult mysteries and thrillers to have inherent credibility issues. I don’t think you can compare a thriller with a teen protagonist with one with adult professionals, like detectives.

I’m a McManus fan, and I think her YA thrillers definitely have their strengths, and their aspects that make them less than satisfying to an adult reader. I love being a thriller reader because we are not hesitant to analyze things! Let’s do it!

The plot of Nothing More to Tell was good and there were many suspects

I think one of McManus’s strengths as a writer is her ability to write mysteries with a lot of suspects. Nothing More to Tell did a great job of really keeping me guessing. Who killed Mr. Larkin? There were a lot of possibilities.

The mentions of her other books was fun. (I noticed shout-outs to The Cousins, Two Can Keep a Secret, and the One of Us is Lying Series. If there was one to You’ll Be the Death of Me, I missed it.)

I also appreciate that McManus’s mysteries don’t generally have a strong romantic aspect. It’s hard to balance a thriller plot with a romance unless you’re writing romantic suspense.

I also really liked the fact that, unlike McManus’s other books which are often multi-POV narratives focusing on a cast of characters, Nothing More to Tell focused more on Brynn. (Tripp is the second POV character, but I’d argue this is Brynn’s book.)

There were a few things about Nothing More to Tell that gave me pause.

Maybe its because I’ve been reading mostly adult thrillers, but it took a while for my brain to process the book’s timeline. Brynn is back to her old hometown of Sturgis, MA, looking into the suspicious death of a teacher as part of her internship. (In that way it gave me Good Girl’s Guide to Murder vibes.)

But Brynn is only seventeen. Her friends found the body of their teacher when they were only thirteen. Brynn, who is going undercover as part of her internship for a true crime TV show, is a minor. We are also expected to consider all these thirteen year-olds as murder suspects. Is it me, or is that weird? Are there that many tween murderers?

The characters in Nothing More to Tell felt familiar

In prior books, McManus drew on high school stereotypes when crafting her characters. I have seen other readers say that her characters can feel familiar from book to book. There are type-A rule followers, beauties, athletes, bad boys with hearts of gold, etc. That’s how teens in 1980s John Hughes movies see each other. Is that how Gen Z sees themselves? (I don’t know.)

Did Nothing More to Tell move away from character labels? Yes and no. Charlotte is a classic queen bee. Tripp has a preppy rich boy name, but he’s not rich. And Shane is a foster kid adopted by a rich family. So the labels are applied differently, but that’s still the lens through which the characters are seen.

In addition, the book describes a class division in the kids’ private school between the “elites” and the “dregs.” I don’t know. I cringed a little at this and it reminded me of the “pogues” and “kooks” from Outer Banks.

The book’s boarding school in a small town setting was interesting

What McManus DID do well (and I wish she’d developed this further) is suggest Sturgis as a down-on-its-luck New England town, and suggest that going to a private school in that town is an uncomfortable experience for all the students. But this wasn’t really a developed part of the story. (And if Charlotte and Shane were truly rich, I believe their parents would not send them to school in Sturgis at all, but to one of the many, many elite New England boarding schools.)

Sturgis is also apparently close enough to Boston that Brynn can do her TV show internship there. The TV show subplot didn’t feel fully integrated into the story to me. I would have liked more of that, as Karen McManus has a journalism background, so details she did include felt realistic.

Overall, I felt there was a lot going on in Nothing More to Tell.

The small town atmosphere, the socioeconomic divisions, the school, the friend group and their history, the TV show element, the murder, and Tripp’s family drama. I think streamlining some of that down would have made the remaining aspects of the book stronger.

Finally, the book features something that drives most thriller readers crazy:

The ending isn’t completely resolved. This is the second book I’ve read recently that does this and in that book, commenters are MAD about it. Just saying.

Did you read this or other books by this author? Tell me in comments!

And if you want to know some of my favorite YA mysteries and thrillers, check out my guide to the Best YA Mysteries to Read! I also have YA on my Dark Academia Reading List. I don’t consider Nothing More to Tell to be true Dark Academia (I explain why in the post!)