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.

Jules plans the perfect destination wedding. How could she have guessed adding one name to the guest list would unravel her perfect day? You will not see this ending coming.

This was an extremely enjoyable mystery. Not only did I not hate the characters as much as I have recently in standalone mysteries (seriously, why have they become so insufferable?), but the alternating viewpoints were genuinely good. I figured out everything going on and who was likely the murderer about two thirds of the way through, but it was still good even then!

Don’t you just hate destination weddings? I mean, not only do you have to spend a lot of money to (basically) go on someone else’s vacation, but you have to bring along expensive clothes, deal with drunken guests, potentially get murdered . . . well, those are some of the things the wedding party has to deal with in The Guest List.

Will and Julia are the “it” couple of the day. Both successful in their careers (he as a reality TV star, she as the owner of a successful blog/online lifestyle magazine), they invite guests to an isolated Irish island for their lavish wedding. The chapters are narrated by various people on the island: Aoife (the wedding planner who owns the venue), Hannah (whose husband is the bride’s best friend), Johnno (the best man), Olivia (the bride’s younger, damaged sister), Jules (the bride herself), etc. Each person seems to have a deep, dark secret that they are trying to overcome.

The story moves back and forth in time, so that we soon find out that someone has been found murdered just after the wedding ceremony. It takes a while for it to come out as to who the victim is and why the murder happened. Then, with all the secrets, it seems there is no shortage of motives, so we are left to find out which secret was worth killing for.

The premise of the story is interesting: people are ferried to the island and then are basically cut off from the rest of the world with a killer in their midst. It was hard to feel much sympathy for anyone as they were all pretty unlikeable (the bride and groom were very pleased with themselves and everyone else was basically had chips on their shoulders). Still, the action moved along at a fast pace and you were left wondering who the victim and murderer were. It felt like it took an overly long time to get to that point, however and while there was a need to have plenty of suspects, it was hard to root for anyone.

I received a free copy of the Guest List from Netgalley in exchange for this review

This book was like a big jigsaw puzzle, bringing together a very disparate group of people that were only joined by knowing the bride and groom, but in the end all had connections to one another. Just like the weather in the book, the pace of the book started out slowly--letting us meet each of the characters, but then the end of the book moved faster and faster and with every chapter the reader would say :"oh wow" and be surprised. There are multiple narrators and most of them have secrets--or at least don't give the reader the whole story, which gives the book all the surprises. This is another one of those books that you just can't put down--you have to keep going so you can see what happens.

This is my first novel by Lucy Foley, and it did not disappoint ! I am a fan of multiple narrators, especially when they each add something needed to the story. The Guest List takes place on a remote island where we celebrate the wedding of the minor celebrity Will to Jules, and switch between the point of view of Jules, the bride, Olivia, her sister, Hannah, her best friend's wife, Aiofe, the wedding planner, and Johnno, the best man as they attend the rehearsal dinner and prepare for the wedding. We are kept in suspense as we are shown snippets of the wedding night, were something terrible has happened, but are not told what.
This book kept me in suspense, and I loved how the relationships unfolded. It kept me guessing and coming up with new theories of what was going to happen.