The Guest List by Lucy Foley
On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. But as the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to emerge... until someone ends up dead.
Krysten’s Review
Reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s classic mysteries, Lucy Foley’s The Guest List is about a posh wedding taking place on a remote Irish island over a two-day period. As the guests arrive and drinks are poured, secrets from decades past begin spilling out, pitting the characters against one another until finally someone snaps.
The bulk of the story is told in first person from the points of view of the wedding planner, the bride, the bride’s sister, the “plus one,” the best man, and (briefly) the groom. Without the cue at the top of each chapter, I would have had trouble deciphering who was who, as they all sound largely the same—with the exception of the male characters. I did, at first, have difficulty keeping all the non-POV characters straight—in particular, the ushers (who were all basically the same person, up until the very end).
The characters are interesting and flawed, and each one has a dirty little secret that comes out by the end. I enjoyed how each character’s story was woven into the overarching plot, and how each bit of backstory served a purpose. Although you know going in that there will be several suspects, Foley did a great job hiding the identities of both the victim and the killer until the climactic moment.
That said, there were a number of coincidences that, by the end, became difficult to accept. The way all the characters seemed to be somehow related was a bit of a stretch.
For instance: (spoilers!)
Will dated Hannah’s sister and Olivia, and left them both so broken they could barely function? And: Jules has a long history with Charlie, who married Hannah, whose sister dated Will? And: Aoife happens to be the sister of the boy Will and Johnno killed, and she happens to be able to get him to the island so she can confront him?
There were also a lot of questions that were not resolved and a number of continuity errors, leaving unsatisfying loose ends.
Such as: (spoilers!)
Why didn’t Aoife’s family have a body to bury, when it states that the boy was found washed up on shore? Why did Foley build up Hannah and Olivia’s relationship (the only two sympathetic characters in the entire book), only to let it fizzle out at the end?
All and all, I really enjoyed the novel and will definitely add Foley’s other books to my (ever growing and impossible to finish) TBR list.
Purchase on: Amazon