Sarah Reviews… The Guest List by Lucy Foley

Good afternoon! We’re mid-week again and rapidly heading into May which, here in the UK at least, means a couple of Bank Holidays to enjoy. No Super Sundays in beer gardens but with working from home currently the chance to close the door on the home office for a long weekend and properly put work away for a little while will be bliss! Today’s review comes courtesy of the Magical Readathon again – this time I was filling the Charms prompt and reading a book with a while cover.

Title: The Guest List

Author: Lucy Foley

Publisher: HarperCollins

Publication Date: 19^th March 2020

Format: Kindle eBook

About The Book…

Set on a remote island off the Irish coast, this is one guest list no one would want to be on, just as no one would have wanted an invitation to the New Year’s Eve party in Foley’s previous novel, The Hunting Party . Lives unravel amid the revelry on an eerie and remote island as family and friends assemble for a glam wedding in an updated Murder on the Orient Express. Each of the principal characters has a reason to want one of their number dead, there are old secrets, and one of them is murdered.

What I Thought…

A beautiful house on a remote Irish island sounds like the perfect wedding location, and it is until one of the guest list goes missing! I love a good mystery story so I suspected that The Guest List would be a story I enjoyed and I certainly did! The Guest List is told from multiple points of view and Lucy utilises a non linear timeline to tell the story. I think it’s something that could have easily gone wrong and become really confusing to follow but the structure of the book, with chapter headings making the point of view and the timeline really clear, meant I found it really easy to follow. I especially loved the way it moved backwards and forwards, meaning you slowly build a picture of what happens on the wedding day, you’re quite a way through the book before you find out for certain who the victim is. It meant not only was I trying to figure out who had a motive, I was trying to figure out who the victim was! I really loved the way things slowly started to come together and make sense.

The Guest List is told from six different points of view: Jules – the bride; Johnno – the best man; Hannah – the plus one; Olivia – the bridesmaid; Aoife – the wedding planner and Will – the groom. As well as multiple chapters for each of these characters points of view we also get a number of general chapters looking forwards and backwards. As we get the multiple points of view we get to know a lot of the characters pretty well. Some I really quite liked, and others I really quite liked to dislike.

Hannah, Olivia and Aoife are probably the characters I warmed to the most in the book. Learning more about their history and their relationship with the bride and groom proved really interesting. On the other hand some of Will and Johnno’s school friends were really irritating! They were your stereotypical former public school boys who had never really moved past the highlights of their school days. My opinions of a couple of character definitely changed as we went through the book as more information was revealed.

Final Thoughts…

Destination wedding gone horribly wrong makes for a gripping read let me tell you! I can see this could easily be a marmite book due to the structure but I loved it. Maybe the next couple of months will bring the time I pick The Hunting Party off my shelf!

More Lucy Foley on SWB

About The Author…

Lucy Foley studied English Literature at Durham and UCL universities. She then worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry – during which time she also wrote The Book of Lost and Found, which was a bestselling debut of 2015.

Lucy now writes full-time, and her first crime novel,The Hunting Party, was a Sunday Times Bestseller.

Her second crime novel, The Guest List, hit shelves in February 2020.