The Guest List (Foley)

The Guest List , Lucy Foley (2020)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a montly book club selection from my Pandemic book club (which is keeping that name even if we're all back to work).

I read PDF and hardcover editions. There were wait lists at both libraries for the ebook. I've gotten used to using the dictionary with ebooks.

Updated 5/18/22

This was a murder mystery where no one is murdered until very close to the end of the book.

The first scene throws you into a stormy wedding reception (in two senses of the word) between a woman's magazine publisher and a male TV star of a survival show. Someone's screaming and people going to investigate. Then you're pulled back to the day before the wedding.

This in itself isn't bad, but the narrative is fragmented across narrators and across time.

The book switches back and forth between past and present so that by the end, the "yesterday" timeline has caught with and passed where the "now" timeline had begun. It continues to go back and forth across the wedding night.

The narrators are the bridge, her sister, the plus one of the bride's best man, and the groom's best man. It stood out that the groom wasn't a narrator until very last in the book. It's also obvious from what people think of him and all the revelations that he will either be the one killed or the killer.

I based this on the fact that Foley didn't want us inside the groom's head for any prolonged amount of time. When we finally are in it, his account of events would make him seem pathological because his narration doesn't agree with any known facts -- and this isn't when he's talking (lying) to other people.

Where the book fails (and where some might think it succeeds) is that it gets to a point where all the narratives end with the lights going out. At this point, I could liken it to a specific episode of "Matlock" or the Broadway show The Mystery of Edwin Drood where you can vote on who you want to be the killer. Several people have been set up and given motive and opportunity.

If anyone else had been the killer, the result might have been just as satisfying (maybe even more so). I get the feeling that my book club wasn't happy with the outcome.

No spoilers here, but was the ending a fair one? Not likely. Did everyone get what they had coming to them or what they deserved? Again, no. Obviously, the dead person wasn't particularly nice, but the survivors didn't exactly get justice either.

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