The Guest List
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Very well written but deeply unsatisfying in the end.
The writing:
Really excellent. I usually hate switches in point of view. Foley did it well in The Hunting Party and she did it well in The Guest List. So well that I had no difficulty keeping the characters and story lines straight. That is a huge accomplishment and one that not many authors can do.
The characters:
Mostly one dimensional and mostly unlikable. A writer of Foley’s skill could have done better. I got the feeling she was so enamored of the structure of the novel she focused all her attention on this-to the detriment of the overall story.
The plot:
Okay. Lots of lies, unsaid words, misunderstandings, long held grievances, desires for vengeance. It’s all there and all well written and even mostly believable until the end when there are just too many people lined up to want to kill this one person. Things fit together a little too neatly.
The structure:
It was such a breath of fresh air in The Hunting Party. I’d never read a mystery structured like that before. We know there will be a victim, but not who it will be until the very end. But to do it again in exactly the same way–the novelty was gone. What was a revelation in The Hunting Party fell short from being anything but a disappointment in the end of The Guest List.
The setting:
And of course there is the additional Christie twist-the setting. A remote island, only the folks there for the wedding could possibly be the victim and the murderer. But again, very similar to The Hunting Party.
The ending (no spoiler)
Disappointing.
First off, after all that build, it felt so incredibly rushed. The motive was hinted at earlier, we knew it would all tie in somehow, but the deed–the murder itself–well, I felt cheated. Christie would have made the victim suffer more. That, after all, was the idea behind And Then There Were None, which this is clearly a tip of the hat to. The more guilty the person, the longer they had to live with the terror they might be the next killed. But in Foley’s ending, the victim went from slight fear to death in a split second. And then it was pretty much over.
Foley is an excellent writer. But she has worn out the novelty of this type of setting and structure. I’d like to see her spend more time on character development and write an actual mystery to be solved, rather than a murder to be revealed.