Two Can Keep a Secret is another teen murder mystery from the author of One of Us Is Lying, which was a really fun Breakfast Club meets Gossip Girl romp, if one of the members of the Breakfast Club ended up dead during detention.
In Two Can Keep a Secret, we’re looking at more of a Pretty Little Liars/Prom Night situation, with even more murder and even more mysteries than the previous book.
To be clear, Two Can Keep a Secret isn’t a direct sequel to One of Us is Lying—it’s just another book with a very similar vibe where some unsuspecting teenagers find themselves in the middle of a bloody true crime situation, and everyone is hiding something. The themes and writing are very similar to One of Us is Lying, of course, but they don’t feature any of the same characters or take place in the same setting.
Two Can Keep a Secret mostly centers on Ellery Corcoran, who moves to the town of Echo Ridge—which she affectionately calls “Murderland”, after the town’s theme park of the same name which was changed to “Fright Farm” after someone was actually murdered there.
Ellery moves to town with her twin brother Ezra to live with their Nana after the twins’ mom, Sadie, enters rehab. Sadie has been struggling and reluctant to return to Echo Ridge after her own twin, Sarah, disappeared the night of her own high school homecoming dance. But the insanity doesn’t stop there—years later, another homecoming queen, Lacey was found murdered at the aforementioned theme park, and after Ellery moves to town, it starts looking like the killer is shaping up for round three when bloody messages and ominous threats start appearing around town. And Ellery, a true crime buff herself, is yanked right into the middle of the whole mess.
“El, we’ve been here three weeks. So far we’ve reported a dead body, gotten jobs at a murder site, and been targeted by a homecoming stalker. Although that last one was all you.”
I always like trying to solve the mysteries along with the characters, so it was a pretty fun and fast read as I tried to figure out what was going on. The book has a huge cast of characters, as there’s a lot going on at any given point, but they were diverse and well developed enough that it was easy not to mix them up, and everyone had their own distinct role to play, both within the book itself and within the mysteries happening around town.
The mystery itself was interesting. I liked the whole concept that there could be this generational killer working his way through the high school classes and disrupting life in this otherwise really run of the mill small town. It felt like exactly the type of Halloween time slasher film I’d devour on Netflix (while simultaneously devouring a giant bowl of popcorn).
The whole small town slasher thing is kind of my wheelhouse (that and camping slashers), but I thought McManus did a good job of capturing that small town feel as well. The obsession with football championships, the extreme focus on family lineage and who’s related to who, and the way everyone knows everyone’s business within moments if it happening all did a great job of nailing down exactly what it’s like to live in such a small town. It was easy to see how a rash of crimes would rock a community like this.
I really enjoyed some of the elements of the mystery, but the most entertaining part by far were the over the top public threats and super dramatic messages left in red paint or fake blood around the town, accompanied by Barbie dolls dressed for homecoming and hanging by their necks or bloody corsages. The imagery of it all felt like something straight out of I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I was living for it.
Although it’s probably not fair to make a one to one comparison between One of Us Is Lying and Two Can Keep a Secret considering they’re not sequels to one another, I can’t help but compare the two just because I wouldn’t have even picked up Two Can Keep a Secret if I hadn’t enjoyed McManus’s first book. (Although for the record, apparently there is a direct sequel to One of Us Is Lying coming in January 2020). That being said, I have to admit I liked One of Us Is Lying a lot more. Part of the reason for that is because it was a contained mystery and we could kind of go down the rabbit hole with each individual character and try to figure out who we suspected the most. Two Can Keep a Secret definitely had a lot more going on, and it seemed like the author pulled a ton of random threads loose as we went through the book with the specific purpose of misdirecting and creating red herrings so that the reveal would be more of an “oh my God” moment once we got to the end.
I guess there’s nothing wrong with one way or the other, they’re just slightly different approaches and I have more fun with the more contained approach than a broadly sprawling situation like this one.
This is definitely a fun read, and if you like slashers and bloody mysteries, you’ll probably have a good time with it. The writing is good but fast-paced and easy to breeze through, the characters are all sarcastic and diverse, and you get to play the guess whodunit game the whole time. What else can you ask for, right? It’s not my new favorite, but I liked it and had a good time reading it—and that’s the whole point right?
What about everyone else? Have you read Two Can Keep a Secret? Did you solve it before the end rolled around? (I admit, I had my suspicions but I was taking things in a different direction than it ended up!) Do you think you’ll get the sequel to One of Us Is Lying in January? Let me know in the comments! As always, you know I’d love to hear from you. <3