The Guest List - Lucy Foley

 

This isolated mystery follows a wedding party on a remote island off the coast of Ireland.  The bride - Jules - is a lifestyle influencer turned magazine publisher.  The groom - Will - is a wilderness survival TV show personality.  It is a pretty high profile wedding and when they gather with their friends and families on this island, long buried secrets get revealed. Any of those secrets could ruin the weekend, but one might be big enough to kill over.

TW/CW: self harm, hazing, suicide, revenge porn, infidelity 

The pacing in this book was phenomenal.  The whole story takes place over about 36 hours.  We start the afternoon before the wedding and then the main plot ends on the wedding night.  The book is a pretty tight 330 pages, which felt perfect for the amount of action and reveals that we had.  The story is told by jumping POVs (discussed later) as well as jumping back and forth in time between the lead up to the wedding and the events after the body is discovered.  So while there is only one body drop, this sort of back and forth really ramps up the tension.  The chapters after the death are told from the POV of a third party narrator so it isn't immediately apparent who died so when we would jump back into the 'past' events, it was really fun trying to find clues and see how the different interpersonal conflicts were building.  I think Foley has a really good grasp on when to change POV/timelines because almost every time a chapter would end, I just needed to keep reading.  Not every chapter ended on a cliffhanger, but there were enough new breadcrumbs introduced that I really wanted to keep following them.  I also think the way the characters were so interconnected also helped keep the pacing up because, as the plot developed, we started to see how these characters (and their secrets) were connected so even if we changed POV for the next chapter, some of those same plot breadcrumbs were in the new chapter so it often felt like we were still continuing on with the same plot.  The reveals were spaced out really nicely and grew in severity so I was constantly being pulled along in the story trying to figure out what the rest of the secrets could possibly be.

The characters were fantastic.  I think Foley does a great job at writing characters that I love to hate.  I love watching rich, entitled characters bicker and fight for perceived social dominance.  I was a little bummed that only one person dies because I could see reasons why multiple characters would be disliked enough to be murdered.  I read Foley's The Hunting Party and it was a very similar sort of friend group but The Guest List added the extra element of celebrity which only complicated the dynamics.  We hop between 5 main POVs - the bride, the bridesmaid, the best man, the plus one, and the wedding planner - and most of them had their own mystery plot thread.  I liked how the wedding planner perspective was used as a more objective, outsider view of the wedding party.  I also thought the interactions between the different characters were really well crafted and we got to see most interactions from both perspectives.  I found all the POV characters to have really strong voices and were easy to identify, even in other character's chapters.  I also found it fascinating how the characters could have such well developed arcs when the story only takes place over 36 hours. The events and revelations on the island mean everyone is leaving a different person and I loved it. 

 This was a home-run of a read for me until the ending. The plot points and reveals were fine, but this had a pretty abrupt ending that I didn't find to be satisfying.  The reader does know the details of the murder but the way the events play out on page, it felt like there should have been more confusion or speculation amongst the characters.  There are multiple characters who have motive to kill the victim but once the body is found, the narrative basically tells us that X character was arrested and charged with the murder and I was really looking forward to maybe some more pointing fingers before the killer is revealed.  I think one of my favorite aspects of an isolation mystery is the fact that the characters are cut off from help so they need to self-police, in a way.  This story had the perfect set up to have the police be delayed by a storm so it is up to the wedding party to keep tabs on everyone and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.  However, it didn't take that route and I think the overall impact of the ending is really dampened by the choice to have the ending wrapped up so quickly.  There was also an attempt as a resolution with some of the characters ass they're leaving the island the next day but those few chapters really left me with more questions.  We didn't get to see any of these resolutions play out, but suddenly characters know the full truth that other characters were keeping secret?  I wanted to see those scenes play out (which I think would have worked really well along side my previous point). If we had maybe 50 more pages with some amateur investigation/secret reveals before the police show up, this could have easily been a 5 star read for me.  I'm sure some readers won't be as bothered by the ending, but I just can't get past it.

I liked the setting of this island off the Irish coast, but I do wish we would have gotten more from it.  I think this is a very character-driven mystery and as a character-focused reader, I loved that choice. However, because of it being so character-focused, it did feel like it could have been set anywhere slightly secluded.  I didn't feel like anything was really gained by it being set on the island.  And I know we are shown why it was on the island from a plot perspective, but I wanted the island to be a bigger character in the book.  We get a little bit of the danger and creepy aspects but so many of the scenes were indoors or not impacted by the setting at all.  I love in isolation mysteries when the setting is an antagonist to the characters solving the mystery.  There were some aspects of the setting I loved - like the cave - and I thought were used to great effect.  However, most of the time I found the setting to be just sort of in the background and not impacting the plot a whole bunch.

Overall, this was a fantastic read but really flopped at the end for me.