Tag Archives: Lucy Foley

#BookReview ‘The Hunting Party’ by Lucy Foley #mystery #thriller

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I’ve read a few of the closed room mysteries by Lucy Foley now but not The Hunting Party, one of her first. So after reading a number of intense thoughtful books, I wanted a page-turning rollercoaster. I wasn’t disappointed. Lucy Foley The Hunting Party begins on 30th December 2018. A group of friends are travelling to the wilds of Scotland by train. Their destination, Loch Corrin, is an exclusive Highlands getaway surrounded by mountains. The height of luxury. As friends since university, they know everything about each other. Or do they. As well as the original students there are the partners, incomers, who try to fit in but are conscious they’re not part of the founding gang. As well as the nine guests there are two members of staff living on site, Heather the manager and Doug the gamekeeper, a handyman, plus two unconnected guests, an Icelandic couple staying at a far-off guesthouse. Doug is an ex-marine who is ‘surviving, existing – just. Not living. That is a word for those who seek entertainment, pleasures, comfort out of each day.’ Through the voices of Doug and Heather, her previous job is hazily defined but she like Doug seems to be running from something, are the observers. Through their eyes we see the group from the outside, without prior knowledge. It adds another perspective.
Everyone, guests and staff members, has a past, something they’re not proud of, something they’re hiding. Ambition. Jealousy. Addiction. Grief. Regret. Anger. Take them out of their comfort zone and put them somewhere unfamiliar and vaguely threatening, anything can happen. And does. Especially when guns are available and a stalking party is on the list of activities.
Foley has chosen an unsettling location. The surrounding hills are beautiful, bleak, empty. The guests stay in individual lodges but socialise and eat in the central glass building, The Lodge. Its lights glare out into the dark. For the uneasy, there is the feeling that someone is outside looking in, just out of sight, watching. Seeing everything. As the New Year’s Eve entertainments commence, alcohol and drugs are consumed, inhibitions drop, long-held resentments rise to the surface. And then it begins to snow. Not just any snow, this is ‘a one-in-a-thousand weather event.’ No one can get in or out.
The story unfolds in a structure now familiar from reading Foley’s other thrillers. In each novel she creates an original world and populates her territory with characters that are each in their way troubled and hiding secrets. Then she adds murder. It’s a formula at which she excels.
Chilling. Read quickly over a weekend. I had my suspicions about the identity of the victim and the murderer, I was correct on one of the two.

Click the title to read my reviews of these other novels by Lucy Foley:-
THE GUEST LIST
THE INVITATION
THE MIDNIGHT FEAST
THE PARIS APARTMENT

If you like this, try:-
‘The Bear’ by Claire Cameron
‘Little Deaths’ by Emma Flint
‘The Girls Left Behind’ by Emily Gunnis

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE HUNTING PARTY by Lucy Foley https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-8zN via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- SW Perry

#BookReview ‘The Midnight Feast’ by Lucy Foley #mystery #suspense

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I’m at a loss how to describe the plot of The Midnight Feast, the latest mystery suspense story by Lucy Foley, without giving away anything critical. It is dark, it is gothic, there is West Country paganism, teenage friendship, spite and a bit of romance set at an ultra-glamorous cliff-top hotel in Dorset which opens at midsummer. Lucy FoleyTold in three timelines. In 2025 as The Manor, described as ‘Soho Farmhouse meets Daylesford Organics,’ opens its doors to guests. At the same location fifteen years earlier when the house was occupied by a retired Government chief whip and his wife. And again in 2025, the day after the opening night party, billed as a midnight feast with mystery musical guests, art in the gardens and a Midsommar theme inspired by the folk horror film.
This is a clever thriller juggling timelines and character arcs, at the heart of which is a them v us dynamic between the house and the locals. People are not who they claim to be, the fun is working out who is who. Untangling the true identities of Francesca Meadows, hotel owner, her guest, staff and villagers is a continuing puzzle as I tried to connect the 2025 and 2010 storylines together. There are a lot of characters to keep track of.
During the summer solstice of 2010, a teenage girl on holiday with her family at a caravan park in Dorset meets a rich girl who is cooler and more confident than her and wants to be her friend. The events of that summer, romance, manipulation, bullying, drugs and death have repercussions on everyone there. The bird theme is a creepy folklore thing attributed to the local villagers, a kind of vigilante group who dress up in black bird costumes to impose justice on wrongdoers. On midsummer night, the birds come into their own.
Francesca the hotelier is a control-freak Goop-influenced woman who sells a lie; locally grown organic produce, for example, that is bought-in from London not grown locally or on the hotel’s organic veg plot. Her husband Owen is a fitness-obsessed architect responsible for developing the woodland retreat lodges, set in the hotel grounds. She doesn’t know he’s installed a tracker on her mobile phone, he doesn’t know she commissioned hidden cameras throughout the hotel. There are loads of secrets, over-the-top opulence, silliness and eerie things happening in the woods. And there is murder.
The hotel’s setting next to ancient woodland adds a gothic darkness to this thriller that is a welcome relief from the champagne, meditation and crystals. I found it a little slow at the beginning but once the guests arrive and the midnight feast approaches, the pace takes off.
An entertaining thriller which kept me guessing, it’s not just a whodunnit but who-was-it-done-to.

Click the title to read my reviews of these other novels by Lucy Foley:-
THE GUEST LIST
THE INVITATION
THE PARIS APARTMENT

If you like this, try:-
‘The Last of Us’ by Rob Ewing
‘The Snakes’ by Sadie Jones
‘Summer House with Swimming Pool’ by Herman Koch

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE MIDNIGHT FEAST by Lucy Foley https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-8o0 via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Kate Quinn

#BookReview ‘The Paris Apartment’ by Lucy Foley #thriller

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I read The Paris Apartment, the latest thriller by Lucy Foley, in two sittings. It kept me guessing nearly to the end, with some unexpected twists along the way. Lucy FoleyWhen penniless Jess arrives in Paris to spend some time with her half-brother, he has disappeared. What follows is a page-turning story of the apartment block where Ben has been living, its inhabitants and the confusing discoveries Jess makes as she tries to find him. It makes her question if she really knows her brother and why he has been so distant from her. This is a book about secrets, small ones, shameful ones, old and new secrets. And one huge one. Jess, at times vulnerable at times recklessly brave, attempts to be pleasant to Ben’s neighbours in this surprisingly elegant old Parisian apartment block. The snobbish couple in the penthouse, the two young women sharing on the fourth floor, a thug and his wife, the silent concierge plus Ben’s old university friend, Nick. The viewpoint swaps quickly between Jess and the other residents as Foley pushes the action quickly from event to event. The chapters are short and snappy and this makes it easy to read just one more, and one more. As Jess struggles to make a connection with these neighbours, she doesn’t know who to trust; and neither did I. I didn’t like any of them and Jess herself is difficult to connect with. But the mystery led me on.
The apartment block offers a kind of ‘closed room’ setting, well-used in crime stories, and it does its job well. It is grand yet mysterious with hidden doors and stairs, spooky attic and cellar, a cranky old lift and a C-shaped construction around a courtyard allowing residents to observe each other. I had a clear picture of it in my head.
Where is Ben? Did someone see him leave? Why hasn’t he answered his phone? And why is he living in Paris anyway? Nick offered him the flatshare but the two men haven’t been in touch for years. Given we don’t see Ben’s viewpoint except a brief Prologue, some things are hidden until the very end. The lines between current time and flashbacks at times seemed blurred and I got a little irritated with Jess’s naivety. A couple of scenarios I thought might be possible turned out to be wrong, but it was fun guessing.
Lucy Foley uses glamorous Paris alongside the sinister apartment building, riots on the streets, juxtaposing Parisian elegance with the seedier side streets and alleys, clubs and bars. As Jess considers each of her neighbours, trying to work out who knows what, shuffling up and down stairs trying to eavesdrop, she inevitably lands in trouble.
A satisfying fast read, helped by short chapters in different viewpoints which gradually construct the mystery like layers of filo pastry.

Click the title to read my reviews of two other novels by Lucy Foley:-
THE GUEST LIST
THE INVITATION

If you like this, try:-
‘These Dividing Walls’ by Fran Cooper
‘Smash All the Windows’ by Jane Davis
‘The Quarry’ by Iain Banks

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE PARIS APARTMENT by Lucy Foley https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5Pk via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Guest List’ by Lucy Foley #crime #thriller

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The Guest List by Lucy Foley is a cracking crime mystery set on an isolated Irish island. The guests are there for the wedding of the year – magazine entrepreneur Jules Keegan is marrying reality TV star Will Slater. What follows is a closed room mystery recognisable from Agatha Christie novels. From the beginning you wonder, who in this group of thirty-somethings is going to be killed? Who is the killer and why? Lucy FoleyFoley expertly plays with our expectations, manipulating our first impressions of the characters as they are introduced. Old friends. Family. School days rituals. Hidden jealousies. Secret wrongs. The atmosphere on the exposed windswept island with its treacherous bogs, cliffs, caves and haunting churchyard is cranked up to full notch. We experience the weekend wedding almost hour by hour as each key character tells their own story, with the narrative chopping forwards to the present during the ceremony and reception. This switching of viewpoint and timeframe can be very sudden but it does ramp up the tension. The murder takes place quite late in the timeline making this more a psychological thriller, building up to the killing you know will happen.
The basic plot questions are – how well does Jules know her husband-to-be? What exactly happened on the stag weekend? What were the rituals at the public school attended by the groom and ushers? And why is Olivia, Jules’s sister and bridesmaid, clearly not coping with life? The options for victim and murderer are extended beyond the bridal group with Charlie, Jules’ best friend, and his wife Hannah; and bridal organiser and host Aoife and chef husband Freddie. Foley presents lots of hints about the past and secret resentments, I guessed a couple quite early on but this didn’t stop me turning the pages.
Read this over a weekend when you need an easy-to-read distraction.

Read my reviews of these other Lucy Foley novels:-
THE INVITATION
THE PARIS APARTMENT

If you like this, try:-
‘The Animals at Lockwood Manor’ by Jane Healey
‘Chosen Child’ by Linda Huber
‘Summer House with Swimming Pool’ by Herman Koch

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE GUEST LIST by Lucy Foley https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4M2  via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Invitation’ by Lucy Foley #romance #historical

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A romance, almost an anti-romance, The Invitation by Lucy Foley is a poignant novel with two parallel stories of dangerous obsession and fantasy. Lucy FoleyHal, who has drifted to Rome after serving in the Royal Navy in World War Two, leads a cheap life, surviving on writing assignments, living in a cheap area, Trastevere. One day he accepts from a friend an invitation to a party, an invitation the friend is unable to use. Arriving in his dusty suit, Hal feels apart from the glamour and wealth on show, the jewels, the gowns, the dinner suits. There he sees an enchanting, puzzling young woman who appears icy, untouchable, out of reach.
They meet again when Hal is invited by the hostess of the Rome party, the Contessa, to be attached as journalist to the forthcoming promotional tour for her film, The Sea Captain. They are to sail along the coast to Cannes where the film will be premiered at the film festival. Invitations, accepted and refused, feature frequently throughout the novel, forcing decisions to be made, plans changed, opportunities grasped. The close proximity of the group of disparate passengers begins to unveil secrets, cracks in carefully-controlled behaviour, shameful secrets and lies. As well as Hal and the Contessa, on board are the ageing, artistic film producer; the ageing, drunk leading man; the glamorous siren-like leading lady; the pale beaten-down photographer; the husband and wife investors; and Roberto, the Contessa’s skipper.
Within this story of a coastal journey is a story-within-a-story, the love story on which The Sea Captain is based. A sea captain returning home from a victorious naval battle rescues a drowning figure. Once on board, it is realised it is a naked woman. The captain is captivated by her, his crew fear she is a witch and will bring bad luck. On land, the captain keeps the woman as his mistress, given everything she might wish, in a lavishly-decorated house. It is a morality tale of the perils of attempting to mould another person into something you want but which they are not. This tale of the gilded cage echoes throughout the novel. So will true life mirror the film version of the story, or the true story? Of course a film is fictional, the truth being manipulated for dramatic effect, something which cannot be done with true secrets which have a way of making themselves known.
A sad, subtle tale of warning about obsessive love, fantasy and longing.

Read my reviews of these other Lucy Foley novels:-
THE GUEST LIST
THE PARIS APARTMENT

If you like this, try:-
‘The Believers’ by Zoe Heller
‘The Tea Planter’s Wife’ by Dinah Jeffries
‘A Mother’s Secret’ by Renita d’Silva

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE INVITATION by Lucy Foley https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3hU via @SandraDanby

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