I love weddings but I rarely get invited to them. I feel better about that after finishing off The Guest List by Lucy Foley because who wants to attend a wedding that goes horribly wrong on a remote Irish island where a group of rather unpleasant people may kill or try not to be killed? Foley is a solid thriller writer who likes to present multiple perspectives while whatever social occasion driving the plot goes impossibly bad. Even after all hell breaks loose the endlessly shifting points of view are so discombobulating that the victim or perpetrator or both aren't obvious until the very end. This trick keeps the reader guessing but also serves to keep us from idenitifying with any character too closely or for too long. It's rather like reading your hundredth Agatha Christie, minus Poirot or Miss Marple.

Foley's types are certainly a batch of chilly ones, with secrets galore and quite a bit of free floatinng anxiety/trauma/rage to spare. The remote sea swept Irish island is as well described as the Scottish estate in The Hunting Party, Foley's previous thriller. Like that book, this one has the sort of rugged, inaccessible, beautiful but dangerous scenery where Britphiles love to wallow. Foley's people may be dangerous, vengeful sociopaths or just high-strung hedonistic nutters, but they're certainly never dull. I just wouldn't want to attend a wedding with ANY of them.

Julia Keegan and Will Slater are about to be married on a remote island off the Irish Coast. As the wedding party and the elite guests begin arriving, the secrets that lie festering just below their perfect façade threaten to expose the truth behind their smiles. Reminiscent of "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie this story had me staying up very late because I couldn't put it down. The characters with their explosive secrets and the extreme remoteness of the wedding location combine to create a perfect storm that will keep you guessing until the very end. I highly recommend this addictive thriller!

This was the first book I’ve read by Lucy Foley and what a treat! Murder! Ghosts! Bogs! Graveyards! Dark, atmospheric and suspenseful, this is a whodunit that will keep you guessing till the end. All starts out well with a wedding on a remote island off Ireland but …as each chapter, told from a different guest’s perspective reveals, all Is NOT well! Everyone has a secret past and the stories become more entwined in a very believable way until the end. Great plotting and setting.

Wow!!! This one is everywhere! If you haven’t picked this one up yet I highly recommend it!
It consists of my favorite things multiple points of view, short chapters, and an ending that leaves you remembering hints that were given throughout the book that ties it all together. .
Also this one I jumped back and forth from reading it on my kindle to listening to the audio version which I loved!!!

Wow...talk about twists and turns. Jukes and Will are going g to have their wedding on a remote island off of Ireland. As the guests start to arrive, we can see that everything is not as picture-perfect as the bride would like it to be. Lucy Foley has done an amazing job of weaving several story threads together. She gives some hints, but not enough for the reader to guess exactly what’s going on. I highly recommended this story...it kept me thoroughly engrossed.

<i>The Guest List</i> instantly reminded me of one of my favorite books by Stuart Turton, <i>The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle</i>.

<i>The Guest List</i> Is a thriller about a wedding weekend, set on a tiny island, accessible by boat. It’s told in perspectives of The Bride, The Plus-One, The Wedding Planner, The Bridesmaid and The Best Man. The reader also gets a few flash forwards of the murder, which happens on the wedding night, after the cake cutting.

The author does a fantastic job of weaving through the storylines of all of the major players in this novel. There are many plot twists that I had no idea were coming and it was quite a dramatic ending. Excellent read!!

Lucy Foley follows up The Hunting Party with a fittingly gripping mystery. It's very twisty, and very fun. I could not put it down.

Take a high profile wedding and set it on a remote island off the coast of Ireland as a storm is coming in. Add in a bride and groom in their 30's with plenty of time to add skeletons to their closet. You have a recipe for a satisfying summer thriller. All those wedding guests -- family, mates from prep school and uni, work colleagues. . . So many opportunities for secrets to be shared, especially when alcohol and recreational drugs are being consumed. There is something about that island that wears the veneer of the civilized exteriors of the guests. What made the waitress scream in terror? Has there been a murder? An accident? With intricate plotting and multiple POVs Foley begins the book with a terrible incident, then circles back to bring us forward bit by bit to the long awaited revelation. Foley's perfect pacing and multitude of red herrings is reminiscent of Agatha Christie. The atmospheric tone and setting will appeal to fans of Ruth Ware. Absolutely stunning. This will be well worth revisiting on audio.

Thank you to HarperCollins and NetGalley for a DRC in exchange for an honest review.

Jules and Will seem to be the perfect celebrity couple, and their wedding on a starkly beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland is on track to be just as perfect. However, as guests begin arriving the tensions start to rise as actions people thought they had left buried in the past come back to haunt them. The Guest List has an "And Then There Were None" vibe, albeit with a much lower body count. The short chapters and rotating perspectives pull you through the action and make for a quick, exciting read. You will be left wondering how well you really know your friends!

I went into The Guest List with some preconceived notions. None of those were correct. This book was much better than I thought. I liked the build up of suspense and I liked how everything was tied up nicely at the end. This book definitely has me wanting to read more by Lucy Foley.

3.5 stars

Jules...the bride
Hannah...the plus-one
Johnno...the best man
Olivja...the bridesmaid
Aoife...the wedding planner

I was somewhere between 3 and 3.5 stars as I was listening to this. It was enjoyable enough for something to listen to on my daily walks, but I don’t think I would have liked it even half as much as I did If I would have read it. I chose this as my April Book of the Month and have a digital copy from NetGalley, but received an ALC from Libro.fm this month.

There are a lot of narrators and none particularly likeable. (I enjoyed the narrator voice of Olivia and Johnno best.) Sometimes, I felt like the narrator, Hannah, was used too much. There’s a lot of build up of a wedding of Jules and Will on a remote island off the coast of Ireland. A lot of build up to a murder, which we know happens in the beginning of the book, but not who it is. You can guess who it will be, though. I didn’t guess the twist, though, and actually liked how it all came together in the end.

Thank you to Libro.fm for my ALC and NetGalley for my digital arc in exchange for my honest review.

I am just going to start off by saying that I stayed up until 1 am to finish this book because I had to know how it was going to end.

No spoiler premise is that there is a murder that occurs at a wedding, but you don't know the victim and you don't know the killer. Everything in this book happens in 24 hours, alternating between the day of a wedding and the day before (with the narrators each giving some background, of course.) I thought the alternating narration between the characters was interesting and kept my attention. There were a lot of cliff hangers at the end of each chapter, but I would keep reading on because I wanted to get back to each one. This all makes the story extremely faced-past, which I LOVE in a thriller.

Most of the characters are prettyyyy awful people, which you get right away, but that didn't mean I didn't like reading from their POV. Also, makes you guess who was murdered AND who did it. It also is set in a VERY cool yet creepy place which really adds to the element of the thriller. A+ setting.

Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley for providing a copy for review.

My heart is pounding, what an awesome, mind blowing, mystery, thriller! I kept turning page after page, I felt the wind, the raging sea, the turmoil of the people affected by this one person! This is the best book that I have read this year! It will be on my top twenty of 2020! Great writing, believable characters, every one of them you can identify with as someone you have met! It doesn't get better than this in the literary field! I hope someone buys the rights, and make an awesome movie, it will be a true thriller! The last chapter blew me away, which is very hard to do, I am a voracious, picky reader, this is the one thriller you should read this year, grabs you from the first page as it races toward the mind boggling end!
I highly recommend! Thank you Netgalley! #The Guest List

Solid thriller. Somewhere between 3.5 and 4 stars.
A wedding takes place on an isolated island where secrets abound and someone ends up dead. Who? And why? Quick, fun read with each chapter being a different point of view. A little confusing with the back and forth of perspectives and times, but not so much that it distracts from the story. Recommended for a fun distraction!

<u>The Guest List</u> was such a fun and fast paced thriller that I could hardly put it down! Foley expertly weaved the multiple POVs together and crafted a setting that instantly draws you in and keeps you hooked until the very end.

My complaints with this book were few and far between. I don't think Peter was a necessary character (there were too many Trevs boys and there's actually a scene where 1. Peter is not included at all and then 2. Gets replaced by Femi later on, I'm guessing by mistake. His only purpose seemed to be to act as filler/the druggie of the group, a role that could have easily been assigned to Duncan). The book's conclusion was a little too neat and everything was a little too perfectly coincidental. It also all came to a crashing halt much too quickly. I would have enjoyed a little more of an epilogue that told us what happened to characters such as Olivia, Jules, and Hannah.

But I was easily able to shrug off these little annoyances as the book itself was quite unputdownable. I'm calling it now-this is bound to be one of the best books of Summer 2020!

I loved Lucy Foley's first novel, The Hunting Party, so I was psyched to get to read this book!
Similar to her first book, The Guest List puts a group of old friends together in a remote location. A coastal island off the coast of Ireland, only accessible by boat. A wedding is the happy occasion, and we have different points of view to tell the story from all angles. Of course, someone ends up dead, and the novel jumps from the present, with the groomsmen trying to find out who is actually dead, to the different perspectives of the bride, the best man, the plus one, the wedding planner, and the bridesmaid.
Of course, everyone has secrets. And those secrets end with someone dead.
Only who is it? And why?
Loved this book! Pick up this one, and The Hunting Party and you'll discover your favorite new mystery writer!

I was really excited for the book, but was sadly a little disappointed. The first 250ish pages were mostly just setting up the story, who the characters were, and how they were all connected. While there were some important pieces of information, a large majority of it was really boring. It honestly just felt like a bad movie.

The last 60ish pages were a lot more interesting however. Here we find out who died, and who killed this person, and why. I thought the majority of the book was going to be us trying to figure out who did it, but that was not entirely the case. While I liked getting to know the full story by the end of the book, and all of the pieces came together, I would have liked to know what happened to the person who was arrested. I feel like we needed another chapter, but maybe that's just the romance reader in me- I want a "happy" ending. Obviously it wouldn't be happy in a book about a murder, but I feel like it could have been more wrapped up.

2.5 stars
I received this book for free in return for an honest review.

I read The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley and really enjoyed it. And after reading The Guest List, which I enjoyed, I feel like I could almost use most of my review from The Hunting Party to describe The Guest List. Not that it’s a bad thing that the books are so similar, just an observation.

Both The Guest List and The Hunting Party remind me a lot of the Christopher Pike books I read as a teen, but it’s as if those books have grown up. There are a lot more adult relations and problems, but still all the twists and draw dropping reveals that I’ve come to expect from Pike, and now Foley.

In The Hunting Party the only likeable characters were the two people who ran the lodge. In The Guest List there were more likeable characters and characters that I felt sorry for in regards to circumstances that others, as well as themselves, had brought upon themselves. There are still a bunch of rich, narcissistic, and psychopathic people in this book, and I am not ashamed to admit I was happy to see some of them get their comeuppance.

In The Guest List, the story is told between some of the guests and the wedding planner and switches time periods, but it’s never hard to follow. The way Foley ties everything up is done masterfully, even if one must suspend their belief in order for it to be believed. But that’s what is great about reading fiction, you get to just enjoy the story. I did see some of the things coming since Foley left some big clues if you’re paying a bit of attention. But when it came to two of the female guests, I enjoyed the twists for them. And while not everyone got to kill off the jerk (and we actually don’t find out who is murdered until late in the book), they way it happened and who is charged for the crime was the perfect ending.

I’m already looking forward to Lucy Foley’s next book, and highly recommend you read The Hunting Party and The Guest List.

In the vein of Murder on the Orient Express, Foley's novel follows a group of guests at a glamorous wedding off the coast of Ireland. Each of the main characters has a reason to want another dead, and every guest wishes they had never RSVP'd yes in the first place.

this is *the* most perfect mystery to cosy up with during your days off. intrigue, atmosphere, suspense and a hint of Irish folklore: CHECK 👏🏼⠀
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the only gripe I have with THE GUEST LIST by Lucey Foley is that it wrapped up too fast for a novel that was quite good on detail otherwise. I still rate it highly though and it's one of the best mysteries I've read in a while.. totally unpredictable! I'll be checking out THE HUNTING PARTY next. 4.5 stars!