The Guest List: From the author of The Hunting Party, the No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and prize winning mystery thriller
£8.50
*The brand new thriller from Lucy Foley – THE MIDNIGHT FEAST – is available to pre-order now*
The No.1 Sunday Times bestseller
*Over 1 million copies sold worldwide*
*One of The Times and Sunday Times Crime Books of the Year*
*Goodreads Choice Awards winner for Crime & Mystery 2020*
A gripping, twisty murder mystery thriller from the No.1 bestselling author of The Hunting Party.
‘Lucy Foley is really very clever’ Anthony Horowitz
‘Thrilling’ The Times
‘A classic whodunnit’ Kate Mosse
‘Sharp and atmospheric and addictive’ Louise Candlish
‘A furiously twisty thriller’ Clare Mackintosh
On an island off the windswept Irish coast, guests gather for the wedding of the year – the marriage of Jules Keegan and Will Slater.
Old friends.
Past grudges.
Happy families.
Hidden jealousies.
Thirteen guests.
One body.
The wedding cake has barely been cut when one of the guests is found dead. And as a storm unleashes its fury on the island, everyone is trapped.
All have a secret. All have a motive.
One guest won’t leave this wedding alive . . .
Lucy Foley’s book ‘THE PARIS APARTMENT’ was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 17-10-2022.
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Additional information
| Publisher | HarperFiction, 1st edition (3 Sept. 2020) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 384 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0008297193 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0008297190 |
| Dimensions | 12.9 x 2.44 x 19.8 cm |
by Kindle Customer
The Bridgee of San Luis Rey meets Six Suspects! Intriguing format, leaving us to discover the victim’s dark side and recognize who had sufficient motive to want them dead. I’m very smug about being right, there were good clues left for us. It also presents us with the deeper question, (like Schindler’s Ark,) of ‘what would I have done?’ from both perspectives. I found it very readable, not every book draws me in like this; but it lost a star for the ludicrous amount of bad language used. It added nothing, not even a degree of reality, and took much away. I’ve never heard anyone claim that they didn’t enjoy a story because of the lack of offensive vocabulary. So I won’t recommend it for that reason.
by MR
I found this a bit of a slog to be honest. You get quite a bit through the book and nothing really happens. The ending was predictable, but good.
by Minty
This is not a murder mystery book in which the wheel is reinvented, and the story undeniably owes an enormous debt to And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (although that Christie novel being the bestselling whodunnit of all time and the founding masterpiece of the entire literary genre, it’s fair to say most good whodunnits exhibit the DNA of the work of Agatha Christie in somewhere). However, this book is compelling, the characters are clearly drawn (however the public school boys are a boring, true cliche and could have been far more original and interesting) and therefore identifiable to the reader. Also, the author has done a good job in connecting events and characters and tying the story up in conclusion. Whilst this isn’t an especially sophisticated work (maybe a good thing for a commercial whodunnit), it was enjoyable and gripping, so I recommend it!
by Kindle Fan
The wedding of the year involving Jules who is a driven and arrogant owner of an online lifestyle magazine and Will Slater, a TV star who loves himself, is due to take place on a secluded remote island.
A masterful take on the slow burning psychological thriller. This format is a classic locked room mystery. We all know the familiar trope….on a dark and stormy night….this book takes advantage of this in spades. The story is told from five perspectives. Aoife, the wedding planner, Jules the bride, Olivia her half-sister and reluctant bridesmaid, Johnno the best man and Hannah the plus one, who is married to Charlie the MC. We get to know the characters in depth as the story unravels. Some we like and sympathise with, others we don’t. Most of the plot seems to involve the ushers, who have all attended the same private school in the past and are boorish, entitled and arrogant.
The island itself has a brooding, dark atmosphere which adds to the general tension mounting story. Lucy Foley does a really good job of ratcheting the tension up throughout the story.
4.5 stars for this one, because I did work out the victim pretty quickly, but not the perpetrator or the reason. Am starting to become a fan of Lucy Foley and am looking forward to more from her.
by Ralph Blumenau
There are one or two worrying improbabilities in the book, but I found it a compelling and tense read. It has terrific atmosphere, both in the setting and in the narrative.
There is a large cast, and the 73 chapters are first-person accounts by six of them. Five of them have secrets to hide.
The book opens during a frightening storm that, for a while, cut the electricity in the marquees in which, on an island off the coast of Connemara in Ireland, there was a party of 150 to celebrate the wedding of Will Slater and Julia (“Jules”) Keegan. When the lights go on again, they hear a scream of terror.
The setting of the story is powerfully eerie. Much of the island is a bog, in which archaeologists have found the mutilated bodies of religious refugees from the mainland. Two of the characters will need to be rescued as they stray into the bog and can’t extricate themselves. Cormorants around the island were taken by the locals to be symbols of greed, bad luck and evil.
Will was a famous TV film actor. Jules, super-efficient and wealthy, ran a magazine. They seemed an ideal couple, but Jules had had an anonymous note telling her not to marry Will.
Twenty years earlier, the bridegroom, his apparently unlikely best man, and his four ushers had all been at the same posh school, where they had all taken part in a bullying game called Survival, which had led to much suffering and to the death of one young boy. The ushers are still a coarse, cruel and jeering lot, and re-enact some raucous school ritual, and one wonders why Will had invited them. But then the glamorous, handsome, calm and charismatic Will turns out to have a sinister, ruthless and truly shocking past which the best man, Jules’ half-sister Olivia and the ushers all knew about, but which, for most of the novel, Jules did not suspect.
Olivia was quite neurotic, went in for self-harm, was anorexic, a nail-biter, and, at one stage, suicidal. She dreaded her role as the sole bridesmaid at the wedding. In due course, we will find out why.
In the course of the novel, the best man discovered how Will had ruined his prospective career as an actor, and was looking for revenge.
It is only right at the end of the novel that we find out who had uttered that scream of terror before being murdered and who had done the deed. Perhaps some readers may have guessed who it would be, though several of the narrators had murderous thoughts; but nobody, surely, would have had the faintest suspicion who the killer was, and it is only at the very end that we learn of the connection between the killer and the victim.
by Joy
Loved every minute of this book. Her characters are so well written, every one of them is a believable person with dimension to them. It’s atmospheric and tense the whole way along, a great murder mystery.
by Ally
Good read