The Guest List - Book Review

 

The Guest List: A Novel by Lucy Foley
Publication date: March 19, 2020
Pages: 319 pages
Genre: Thriller, Mystery
Rating: 3/5 stars ☆☆☆
Strengths: Interesting plot, satisfying ending
Weaknesses: Implausible - too many coincidences

The creepy vibe in this one was excellent. I wanted to vacation on a haunted, gloomy, dangerous island too!! But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about what was happening.

The bride (a successful magazine publisher) gets an awesome deal on a destination wedding intended to launch an island resort off the coast of Ireland to popularity. This seems like the right way to get a great deal (for the engaged couple and their guests), and great publicity for the resort (since the groom is also a local celebrity - star of his own show about wilderness survival). 

The perspective of how the story is told starts jumping back and forth. The night of the ceremony, something bad goes down in a brutal storm just outside the tents where everyone is celebrating. But this is juxtoposed against the build up to the wedding, and the quirks each of the characters involved seem to have.

The groom's party is some of his old private school friends. They're decidedly not nice guys. And they haven't changed over time, since they apparently were not nice to the guy who is a member of the bridal party. They're jerks, and they seem to bring out the worst in each other and those around them.

The bride may be a bit shallow, but her heart is good, and she really just wants things to be perfect for her big day. If only she had surrounded herself with good people to start with.

Anyway, someone ends up dead. By the end of the book, it's pretty clear that the corpse deserved what they got, from several different directions. So who really did the killing? It's worth reading the book to find out. I'd give this book 3 out of 5 stars. It was fun to read and the vibe was super-creepy.