The Guest List by Lucy Foley

[Kelly]

I said I wasn’t going to give another one of her books a chance because of how much I didn’t like The Hunting Party, but at this point I had already bought The Guest List. It starts off a lot stronger than The Hunting Party but they are still very similar. They both have a group of friends that were close when they were younger and are now having a get together for one reason or another; there’s a deep dark secret that happened in their past that they don’t want coming up; and not plot per say but both books have similar characters that I could pair up.

The entire story fit together so perfectly (too perfectly for my liking) which also made it easy to call out all the connections that were supposed to be a shocker to the reader. These twists were very melodramatic and a little over the top if you ask me.

There were short scenes about what was currently happening with the long chapters about what happened the day before or the morning of and they didn’t seem to add much to the plot. I thought it would help feed information to the reader to create suspense but it was a lot of, “Oh my gosh, there’s a person there with a knife!” or “That looks like a dead body. Just kidding, it's a log.” This again adds to the melodrama of the book. I think if the story was told in chronological order, it wouldn’t feel like the author is wasting time between the bigger chapters of the book.