Review: The Guest List by Lucy Foley

The Guest List is a murder mystery set the day before and the day of a wedding. The point of view characters are the bride Jules, the plus-one Hannah, the wedding planner Aoife, the best man Johnno, and the bridesmaid Olivia. Every chapter not in third person is headed with the character's name and their role in the wedding, an element I loved. As you read through the novel, you discover secrets and resentments building in the day before the wedding as well as following the discovery of the murder during the wedding.

This book is wildly popular, so it is not a huge surprise that I liked it. I am certainly not the kind of reader that tries to pick apart books just because they are popular. I am totally fine jumping on the bandwagon for a popular book. Somehow this book was not at all on my radar; I picked it up on a whim while book shopping with a friend who was buying this book for herself.

When you are reading a mystery of any sort, you know that every detail is important. This book does an excellent job of misdirection or at least of laying out so many threads that are important that you don't necessarily tie the right clues together. I was so close to so many reveals, and I was JUST barely wrong, or I was a tad too slow to guess before the book told me. It made a really fun reading experience because the story really rewards playing along and trying to parse out the mystery. I did get some things; my top guess for who gets murdered was correct and was ever so slightly off about who was the murderer. It is a very well-plotted book.

I have never fully understood the folks who need to think the characters are good and likable to like a book, but if that describes you, this book probably is not one you will like. Some of the characters are very likable, some of the characters are flat-out terrible, but most of them are a bit of both. Lucy Foley writes morally ambiguous characters very well. She writes slimy people very well also. I also liked her portrayal of the likable characters; they weren't too perfect, they were excellent for showing us terrible behavior and making it clear that we were meant to see it as terrible.

I liked the pace; I was pulled into the story quite quickly. I was reading two books in tandem and switched to just this book because I needed to solve the mystery. It is always fun to be invested in a story. I wanted to see how all the secrets and lies intertwined.

I found the reading experience so enjoyable that I am now interested in diving into other Lucy Foley books! I am very glad that my friend inspired me to pick up this book; I now have three more books to read! I was pretty torn between four and five stars and I always side with rounding up! I enjoyed this book a lot, which should be noted properly. I gave this book five stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph.