The Guest List

St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 25th July 2022.

The guest list. Lucy Foley.

The general feeling of this reading group meeting (held in the library for the first time since February 2020), was that this book was a pretty good page-turner, an easy read, and contained various interesting elements. The setting, on the island off the Irish coast, came over very vividly and a lot of people liked it, and the idea of hiding the identity of the victim as well as that of the murderer until near the end of the book, was thought very clever.

However, this book was very obviously a reprise of her other title The Hunting Party, complete with obnoxious over-privileged characters behaving badly at a social function. Though the characters were thought better portrayed than those in The Hunting Party, there were almost exact comparisons: the glamorous couple, the put-upon staff, the dowdy extra female, and there were intelligent women falling for amoral men and the general tendency for good-looking people to be bad and more ordinary-looking ones good. These traits found little favour with the readers, who mostly found it hard to sympathise with these people.

A couple of readers did not like the narrative’s continuous switching from past to present and from character to character, though another commented that they enjoyed this technique. Some were unconvinced about how the guests were lured to the venue, and one reader wasn’t sure that the account of the little boy tied up on the slipway and then washed away was technically possible, or likely.

Almost everyone commented that the whole story, enjoyable as it might have been, seemed to act as a warning to parents not to send their children to private schools!

Amazing thriller!! Really liked the short snappy chapters, all the suspense and I really had no idea who had done it till the end. Also really liked the character development throughout, really wanted to get to know all of them.