The Guest List by Lucy Foley

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

Published June 2020 by HarperCollins Publishers

Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:
The bride – The plus one – The best man – The wedding planner – The bridesmaid – The body

On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed.

But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride’s oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast.

And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?

My Thoughts:

While I was reading this book, I was balancing it with two others - all needed to be read within about a two week period and all were good. But this was the book that I kept wishing I was reading when I was reading the others. 

Foley alternates the chapters between five characters - the bride, the plus one, the best man, the wedding planner, and the bridesmaid - and between the days leading up to the wedding and the wedding itself. It's an interesting way to reveal pieces of each character and to slowly reveal what happens at the wedding. We know early on that something terrible has happened but we don't know until nearly the end that there actually is a dead body nor who it is. As the chapters reveal more and more about the characters, we find ourselves thinking that any one of the characters might end up being a victim and that there are any number of reasons that each of them might be killed. Almost all of the characters in the book, major and minor, are unlikable, from the bride and groom to her parents and every last one of his groomsmen. Even the wedding guests themselves, most of whom remain nameless, are nothing more than a bunch of thoughtless drunks. 

Each of the characters, of course, has his or her own secrets that are revealed throughout the book but the biggest surprises for me were in how some of the characters tied in with each other, making the victim more obvious but the killer even less so. At least that's the way it worked for me. The setting provides the perfect set up - isolated, posing the possibility of secrets the island might reveal and dangers from the setting itself. I liked the way Foley handled the reveal of the murderer and the fallout from the murder but the closing of the book fell flat for me. Still, it was just the kind of book that I'm enjoying right now - the kind of book that pulls me through it and takes me completely away from my own reality.