"If At First You Don't Succeed, Lie..."
— 01/31/11

Pretty Little Liars is a series of young adult novels by Sara Shepard. The series follows the lives of four girls — Spencer, Hanna, Aria, and Emily — whose clique falls apart after the disappearance of their leader, Alison. Three years later, they begin receiving text messages from someone using the name “A” who threatens to expose their secrets — including long-hidden ones they thought only Alison knew.

Originally developed as a television series by book packaging company Alloy Entertainment, the idea was described as “Desperate Housewives for teens.” Alloy met author Shepard and gave her the property to develop into a book series. The first novel, Pretty Little Liars, was released in October 2006. It was followed by Flawless and Perfect in March and August 2007, Unbelievable and Wicked in May and November 2008, Killer in June 2009, and Heartless in January 2010. An eighth installment titled Wanted is set to be released in June 2010.

ABC Family began casting for a Pretty Little Liars television pilot in October 2009, and in January 2010 the network picked up the series for 10 episodes, to premiere on June 8, 2010.

Pretty Little Liars

Alison DiLaurentis, manipulative and vindictive “Queen Bee” of Rosewood Day, rules with an iron fist over her clique: Spencer Hastings, a perfectionist always trying to outdo her over-achiever sister and the only girl in the group to ever stand up to Alison; Hanna Marin, overweight and so desperate to be popular that she bends to Alison’s will; Aria Montgomery, a former outsider; and Emily Fields, a competitive swimmer from an ultra-conservative family who is most protective of Alison. But before the start of the 8th grade, Ali disappears after getting into a heated argument with Spencer at a sleepover with the other girls, and the group falls apart.

Three years later (a year in the show — the girls are 16 at the start of the show), Aria — back from a stint in Iceland that left her feeling confident, beautiful, and more stylish than ever — reluctantly returns to town to find former nerd Mona Vanderwaal and a newly-thin Hanna to be the new social leaders of Rosewood Day. Soon Aria begins an affair with her English teacher, Spencer falls for her sister’s boyfriend, Emily is in love with the new girl at school, and Hanna not only shoplifts, but also purges to stay thin. Suddenly a mysterious person called “A” threatens to reveal the girls’ secrets from past and present, including ones they thought only Alison knew — and one in particular that the girls refer to as “the Jenna thing.” Ultimately, Alison’s body is found cemented in her former back yard, and the DiLaurentis family holds a funeral for Alison in Rosewood, “the only home Alison ever knew.” By the book’s end, the identity of “A” remains unknown.

Flawless

In the aftermath of Pretty Little Liars, Spencer, Hanna, Aria, and Emily are more desperate than ever to discover the identity of “A”, who is still taunting them with the threat of exposing their many secrets. Their personal problems continue; Aria begins a relationship with Sean, Hanna’s ex, and faces the problem of her dad pulling away from the family while continuing his affair with his student, Meredith. At the same time, her little brother, Mike, also finds out. Emily ends things with Maya, and begins loving a boy named Toby Cavanaugh. Hanna begins to have many problems with her best friend, Mona, and deals with stress brought on by her failing body image, the loss of Sean, and the re-appearance of her father in her life. And Spencer continues her secret relationship with her sister’s ex boyfriend, Wren.

Perfect

Emily is in a secret lesbian relationship with her new neighbor, Maya, as Spencer has flashbacks to the night of Ali’s death. Aria tries to keep her father Bryon’s affair a secret from her mother and brother while Hanna deals with her social downturn by resuming her bulimia. Spencer remembers pushing Ali into a stone wall after a heated argument, and fears that she is the one who killed her. After Aria ignores “A’s” threats, “A” reveals her father’s affair to her mother, who kicks Aria out of the house. “A” also reveals Emily and Maya’s romance publicly, and Emily’s parents force her into a program to “cure” her apparent lesbian feelings. Aria is also cheating on her boyfriend with her AP English teacher Ezra; “A” sends a picture of them making out to Aria’s boyfriend, who calls the police. Hanna is humiliated at Mona’s 17th birthday party,and is rescued by Lucas. She later receives a text from “A.” This time, the number is not a jumbled mess, and Hanna recognizes it; she discovers who “A” is. She calls Spencer, Emily, and Aria to tell them to meet her the Rosewood school playground, their special spot. Before she can tell them what she knows, Hanna is hit by a car.

Unbelievable

Hanna survives the car crash but has no memory of who “A” is. Emily is sent to live with her strict aunt and uncle in Iowa after the “gay away” program fails to turn her straight. Emily meets a bisexual girl named Trista at a party her cousins take her to. Emily’s aunt and uncle find out about the party, and ask whose idea it was. Emily’s cousins blame it on her and she eventually runs away. Ezra has moved after avoiding formal charges, forcing Aria to move in with her father. Emily sees her parents on the news telling her to come home; after doing some thinking, they are now willing to accept her for who she is, even welcoming Maya. Spencer and Mona plan a party for Hanna’s return to Rosewood Day, and Mona reveals that she has received messages from “A” as well. Spencer begins to suspect that Melissa is Ali’s killer. Recovered from her injuries, Hanna starts dating Lucas again. Despite Lucas’s warnings of Mona’s bad intentions, Hanna breaks up with him in part due to Mona’s interference. At Hanna’s party, Maya catches Emily and Trista kissing and runs off. The girls are set to turn in Melissa to the police for Ali’s death; at Mona’s insistence, Emily and Hanna wait at the party while Spencer and Mona drive to the police station. Something Emily says triggers Hanna’s memory of her accident, and she suddenly remembers who “A” is:Mona. Hanna immediately texts Spencer telling her to get out of there. But before she can, Mona realizes Spencer knows her true identity. Mona takes her to Falling Man’s Quarry, where she attempts to dispose of Spencer. Spencer proves stronger, resulting in Mona plunging to her death. At the same time, Ian, Melissa’s former boyfriend, is “proven” to be Ali’s killer. His motive was that Ali would threaten to tell Melissa of their secret relationship and he was there the night of her disappearance.

Wicked

A new “A” begins making threats. Ian denies Ali’s murder. Emily questions her sexuality after she gets a new boyfriend named Isaac, which she doesn’t tell her parents and sister about. Hanna has trouble with her step-sister Kate while trying to stay the most popular girl in school. Aria flirts with a man who later becomes her mother’s boyfriend and Spencer comes to believe that she is adopted. At the end of the book the four girls find Ian dead in the woods behind the Hastings’ house. Immediately, they get a text from “A” saying “he had to go.”

Killer

The girls discover that the person they think is Alison’s murderer has actually been framed and start to wonder if the new “A” really wants to threaten them or possibly help them figure out the mystery. Emily has sex with her new boyfriend whose mother finds out and banishes Emily from their house without Isaac knowing. Hanna and Kate compete for the affections of Aria’s brother Mike while Aria falls in love with Jason DiLaurentis again. Spencer meets up with a woman she thinks is her real mother and attempts to move to New York. Ian, who the girls find to be alive, reveals some secrets about Ali’s disappearance. When the woods behind Spencer’s house catches fire Aria barely escapes along with a girl whom the others recognize as Ali.

Heartless

After the fire, no one believes the girls when they insist that they saw Ali since she mysteriously disappeared. “A” sends Emily to Lancaster, where she discovers that an Amish girl named Leah disappeared around the time of Ali’s death. Emily also discovers that Officer Darren Wilden had been Amish and left the community, and she soon comes to believe that he killed Leah. Thinking that Ali’s ghost is trying to tell her something, Aria goes to a séance; she learns nothing, but meets Noel Kahn. She initially does not trust him but later changes her mind, kissing him after he comes to her defense at a party. Aria sees another medium, who produces a message in Ali’s handwriting that says “Ali killed Ali”. Hanna’s father sends her to a clinic, The Preserve at Addison-Stevens, to prevent her eating disorder from reappearing due to stress from the Ali situation, and to cure her post traumatic stress disorder. Hanna befriends another patient named Iris,who has an unknown past that may have connection with Ali and later abandons her after another patient reveals Hanna’s scandalous past to everyone at the clinic. Hanna dreams about Ali, who leads her to suspect that Iris had something to do with Ali’s death. “A” sends Spencer messages which make her suspicious of her mother; Spencer learns that at one point her father had been having an affair with Ali’s mother. Spencer realizes the possibility that Ali and Jason are her half-siblings, and is led to believe that her mother may have killed Ali because of it. Spencer confronts her parents, but her mother is shocked to hear about the affair for the first time.

Aria, Spencer, Emily, and Hanna are all arrested for Ali’s murder; together in a jail cell, they realize that “A” has tricked each of them into believing someone else killed Ali, and turning them all against each other. Jenna Cavanaugh is murdered, and the girls are released when it is discovered that a workman named Billy Ford had been working at both Ali and Jenna’s houses when they died. The girls suspect that Billy is the new “A” when they discover that he had been posing as Ian, but later they are taunted by an “A” who may or may not be Billy.

Wanted

In the Conclusion to the series,Mrs. DiLaurentis reveals that Ali has a twin named Courtney who did not live with the family due to health problems. Courtney was hospitalized at the Radley. The weekend the PLL show up in the backyard, Courtney had been home so she would be switched to the Preserve. However, she and Ali had been fighting because Courtney stole Ali’s ring, the one monogrammed with the letter A (the ring that was previously used to identify Ali’s body) and when she was given the opportunity, she snuck into the backyard to talk to Spencer, Emily, and Aria (the night that the three of them had tried to steal Ali’s flag piece) and pretended to be Ali. In the mean time, Alison was inside trying to persuade her parents that she was Ali, but since that was always Courtney’s act, pretending to be Ali, they didn’t believe her and swiped Ali off to The Preserve Addison-Stevens, the mental hospital where Hanna stayed later in the books instead.

In present time, Courtney slowly attempts to befriend Spencer,Aria, Hanna, and Emily, and they all bond with her except for Aria, who is suspicious, after finding Polaroids from the night of the sleepover, including one of the person taking the pictures (reflected in a window. The person is definitely not Billy Ford, but a woman. Though the picture is blurry, Spencer is scared that it might be her sister Melissa.

Ali eventually tells them all that she is not in fact, Courtney, but Ali. She explains that on the night of the seventh grade sleepover, she ran into the house, and Courtney came outside; consequently, Billy Ford, the suspected murderer of Ali, killed the wrong sister. She continues to say that while she tried to convince her parents that she was Ali afterward, they still believed that she was Courtney and shipped her off to a mental hospital. Eventually, they all believe her, and after going to a big Rosewood Day dance, they go off to Ali’s vacation home in the Poconos.

The finale takes place there, when Ali admits that she wants to erase the last 7th grade sleepover forever, by reenacting it. Ali hypnotizes them, as before, but instead of stopping her, this time Spencer is catapulted back into the memory of that night in 7th grade. She pays close attention, and notices that Ali is wearing her monogrammed ring, except it displays the initial “C”, instead of “A”, revealing that it is Courtney hypnotizing them, not Ali. Ali, meanwhile, is outside the barn, taking the Polaroids, and wearing the “A” ring. The Polaroid Aria found was of Ali, not Melissa, but as Melissa and Ali have the same father, they look enough alike to be mistaken for each other. In Spencer’s memory, Ali slams the door, at the same time as she does it in real life. She is jolted awake, and realizes, along with the others after she wakes them up, that Ali is gone, and they are locked in.

The girls find a letter under the door, addressed to “Four Bitches” and from “A”. Slowly, the letter reveals the entire truth. The night Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna tried to steal Ali’s flag, Courtney really did intervene and pretend to be Ali, while the real Ali was shipped away. Courtney obtained Ali’s entire life and personality, while Ali’s attempts to let her parents know what was really happening went unheard. They realize that they never even really knew Ali. The tight-knit bond they had cultivated was actually with Courtney. On the night of the 7th grade sleepover, the real Ali was, indeed, home to move from the Radley to the Preserve, and she was able to see exactly what Courtney had done with her life. Infuriated at Courtney’s foolish fling with Ian Thomas, clumsy blinding of Jenna Cavanaugh and dumping of Riley and Naomi, Ali makes a snap decision to get revenge. After Courtney and Spencer argued about the blinds, and Courtney left the barn, Ali pushed her into the half dug hole, killing her (hence the medium Aria saw saying “Ali killed Ali”).The body they found was Courtney’s, but dismissed as Alison’s as they had the same DNA and dental records, due to being twins. After Mona died, Ali took over and became A. Her mission: to get revenge on the Pretty Little Liars because she resented the fact that Courtney dumped Ali’s popular friends to befriend complete losers.

Back to present, Ali sets fire to the house with the intent of killing the PLL, who are locked inside. They manage to escape through the hidden staircase that Aria remembers from a previous stay in the Poconos with Ali, but after a feverish though quick interrogation by Emily, Ali remains trapped in the house. After the fire, firefighters fail to recover Ali’s body. But at the end there are a few unsettling hints saying that Ali is still alive. Meanwhile, Aria reconciles with Noel Kahn, her boyfriend (whom Ali previously kissed to make Aria think Noel was a cheater), and tells her mother, Ella, about the times Ella’s boyfriend, Xavier hit on her, causing Ella to dump him, making Aria more comfortable spending time at her house. She begins to spend equal time with her father and Meredith, who has given birth to a beautiful baby girl, who they want Aria to help name, as well as Ella. With a restored friendship between Aria, Emily, Spencer, and Hanna, as well as familial affairs finally in order for her, Aria’s life is finally back on track and she is happy. Spencer and her boyfriend Andrew Campbell are as happy as ever, and she and Melissa are finally getting along for real. The Hastings parents aren’t quite getting back together yet, but they are also making an effort to be civil. Hanna’s mother returns from Singapore, and forces Hanna’s father, Kate, and Isabel to move out of their house, which, to Hanna’s delight, she refuses to give up. She and Mike Montgomery continue their relationship, and though Kate, Naomi, and Riley are still vicious to Hanna, as she is back with her boyfriend and new friends, she simply doesn’t care anymore. This marks a turning point in her life, as before she would do anything to be accepted by them. Emily buries the change purse Ali gave her, along with all of the pictures and notes that are the remnants of their friendship. She moves on, for once happy, although, or maybe because, Ali is dead.