Jules and Will are getting married on a remote Irish island. Among their guests are:
Olivia: Jules’ half sister
Charlie: one of Jules’ closest friends and
Hannah: Charlie’s wife
Johnno: The best man
A gang of Will’s (fairly obnoxious) friends and assorted family members. The festivities are all presided over and catered by the venue’s owners Aoife and Freddie.


Someone at this wedding isn’t going to make it out alive, and responsibility must lie with an attendee - but who dies and who did it? Well the fun of this book is in the guessing and why do I never get it right?!


This book is every bit as addictive as The Hunting Party, with an equally creepy setting. The mostly pretty unlikeable characters are each harbouring their own secrets, details of which are revealed tantalisingly slowly through chapters told from each of their viewpoints. Foley expertly manages to capture the often complex dynamics of old and blended friendship groups. Her characters are, on the whole, believable and though the plot does rely on a number of coincidences, it doesn’t feel outrageously far-fetched.


What the author has completely nailed here once again is creating a fabulous premise with absolutely perfectly paced narrative. The tension and excitement ramps up in the latter half through shorter and sharper chapters until you just have to race through the last 75 pages. There’s no choice really; the book just doesn’t allow itself to be put down until all has been revealed.

A mistake I made was having read The Hunting Party quite recently. Since there are quite a few similarities in plot, structure and, necessarily, style I found myself a little disappointed and worried that The Guest List was following a (granted, winning) formula. But this was forgiven and forgotten as the book progressed and I was 100% hooked. I loved it!

An exclusive wedding is taking place on a island off the coast of Ireland, including a group of old school friends, a survivalist TV presenter and the bride, who edits and runs a successful online magazine. But there are secrets, and lies, and the wedding ends with the discovery of a body - but whose?

It's a very similar style to Lucy Foley's first novel The Hunting Party, and just as enjoyable. There were several people who could have been the body, and just as many people who could have been the killer - and I really didn't expect it to be the one it was! Some of the characters were a lot more sympathetic than others, and none of the POV characters leave the island the same as when they arrived, with some relationships broken and others mended (and that mending gives one of the more unsympathetic characters a redeeming feature and some hope for the future).

I'll be reading her next novel too!

A gréât thriller that I read quickly dying to know what had happened. Lots of different threads pulled together

A twisted and effective psychological thriller with a glittering razor-sharp edge.

The actual guest list delivers a whole case of ‘Marmite’ characters who will definitely give you stark choice of either loving or hating them. Behind their perfected pretences lie a sourness that can only be disguised with artificial sweeteners, like fake smiles and tans, for so long.

Through a series of carefully crafted hints, rather than obvious tells, it appears almost everyone has something to hide – and some are more successful than others, in more ways than one. Everyone else is either harbouring a festering resentment or an insane level of contagious camaraderie carried forward from their private and very privileged education.

All of this, coupled with the extreme isolated setting, provides the perfect host for its creeping tension to grow tauter with each passing chapter – being short and having alternate narrators makes them highly addictive!

Put it this way, if you liked ‘The Hunting Party’ you will LOVE this.

ACTUAL RATING: 4.5 / 5

This is my second book by Lucy Foley and once again I found it very enjoyable and would highly recommend it. It was atmospheric and enthralling and the build up to the climax brilliantly written. The character development surprised me and I loved the ending. Recommended.

Love Lucy Foley - and am very much enjoying her move into thrillers. This is just the kind of book I love - multiple characters, different perspectives, a slowly unravelling plot, lots of secrets.

I did think it was a little convenient how everyone was so connected in this one though, I was gripped, but I think I enjoyed The Hunting Party more.

The Guest House is a new thriller from the author of "The Hunting Party" and I can see similarities between these two novels - a remote location, where in a close group of people jealousies and secrets come to life. This time, we meet Will, Jules and their wedding party on the remote island. The narrative splits between a day when we found out something horrible has happened and a day leading up to it, again, a similar setup. But I really enjoyed reading this thriller, more then the previous one - it was chilling, atmospheric, fast-paced. It had some great characters and some likable ones too. Perhaps there was too much coincidence in some places, but I was so gripped while reading the book that they didn't matter to me. All together, a great read!

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A tour de force of a locked room mystery that even Agatha Christie would have been proud of.

Normally, I am not a fan of locked room mysteries, mainly because it takes an author with an extraordinary imagination to make it work, but after reading "The Guest List" I have become an ardent convert of this sub-genre of detective fiction. This is solely down to Lucy Foley. What an exceptionally gifted writer she is. This novel has also given me a headache, however, just when I thought my top 10 novels of 2019/20 had taken a definite shape, "The Guest List" disrupts the settled order. I will not recount the albeit brief, but no less impactful blurb for the novel, which says it all really, for what marks this story out as exceptional in a crowded genre is not an idea or high or low concept, as these empty labels have increasingly been applied to books and films as marketing tools, but the unique talents of the author - Lucy Foley. This book has it all; including a finely calibrated plot, evocative writing, chapters that bleed into each other seamlessly and the exceptionally well-drawn characters that populate the narrative throughout. Oh, and did I mention that you simply have to read this in one sitting? Well you do. So get comfortable and enjoy this wonderfully creepy, atmospheric novel.

Exceptional... no more needs to be said.

I know it is said too often with books but I truly could not put this book down. I knew there were links between characters but the clever plot device of different viewpoints teases the reader to guess what they might be. The tension built by starting with a victim but then going back in time forcing the reader to second guess what was happening next. Who was the vitim? who was the killer? (if there was one) and what were the connections between the characters. The haunting Irish location during a storm with its spooky history set the scene reminding me of an Agatha Christie novel. This book was so good I instantly purchased Foley's first book. Read this book you won't be disappointed.

This does have a very similar structure to The Hunting Party but hey, it's a great structure, and I think university friends meeting up for a weekend away has a different enough vibe from strangers coming together for a wedding (and in fact, quite a crucial plot point hinges on the fact that a wedding means people from all parts of your life suddenly being in the same place). The creepy atmosphere was expertly done. I did partly guess the twist, a lot of the narrative hangs on some incredible coincidences and it wraps up extremely abruptly, but it's such an enjoyable ride it doesn't really matter.

Each chapter is perfectly paced as the author expertly teases the reader through the layered lives of the wedding party. Lives that are dripping with secrets, grudges and resentments which are about to surface with deadly consequences. The descriptions of the isolated location help create the perfect backdrop for the disintegration of the wedding.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it difficult to drag myself away from it. I haven't read Foley's début yet but I definitely will now. She's truly hooked a new fan!

When you read the synopsis you think, ah, the same story as "The Hunting Party" (which I enjoyed a lot incidentally) - a group of "friends", a remote location, bad weather ... but it's not!

This is an incredibly well plotted story of secrets and lies, past and present misdemeanours and mistakes all of which are slowly revealed until the shocking denouement. Ms Foley does give us some "clues" along the way as to who did what, when and to whom but she still manages to misdirect the reader (which is how it should be!)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and expect it to be a best-seller in 2020.

Thank you to the HarperCollins for the advance review copy.

Wow this was a whole load of twisted personalities right here, all gathered together for an impressively sparkling wedding…but like all good parties it’s going to be murder….

I loved the island setting of this one, beautifully described to give a sense of isolation and danger – the danger being all too real as Jules looks to have the perfect day but everyone else seems set to misbehave. Old secrets, old grudges, this is indeed a wedding to die for. Or to die at….

Lucy Foley draws her characters with many layers, digging slowly underneath the surface glitter to show you the true personality underneath. It is completely addictive as a storm rages in more ways than one and I can’t think of another novel I’ve read recently where the ending was so utterly utterly satisfying. I left The Guest List behind with a wry smile and a nod to the immaculate plotting and clever nuances of human nature.

Loved it. I thought The Hunting Party was brilliant but The Guest List takes it up a notch.

Very much recommended.

This is my second book by Lucy Foley and it does not disappoint. Julia Keegan is marrying Will Slater on a remote Irish island. Everything has been planned, Olivia the Bridesmaid, who is also Julia's sister, Johnno the Best Man, Hannah, the Plus One and also the wife of Charlie who is Julia's best friend and Aoife the Wedding Planner all tell the story of the wedding from their point of view when a guest is found murdered and has many enemies. Lucy Foley tells an atmospheric and tense story and I did not guess who dunnit!

Like The Hunting Party, Lucy Foley's first psychological thriller, The Guest List is a gathering of old friends set in a remote location. This time, the inaccessible venue is an island off the west coast of Ireland.

Jules, a successful online magazine editor, is about to marry Will, the star of a TV outward bound programme called Survive the Night.

Aoife runs The Folly - where the wedding will take place - with her partner, the shy Freddie. She has come to live on the small island, known to her from her childhood holidays.

Jules and Will seem the perfect golden couple - attractive, successful, charismatic - but they haven't known each other long and cracks soon start to appear. Jules has received a note telling her not to marry Will - that he is not who he seems. When his old school friends arrive - the ushers - tension escalates. The men, now in their early thirties, are advancing in their careers - all except Johnno, who is a mess. It soon becomes clear that something happened at the school involving Johnno.

Meanwhile, Jules' bridesmaid, her half-sister, Olivia, is quietly falling apart. She too has a secret that is eating her from within.

Similarly, Charlie, Jules' best friend, and Hannah, his wife, are going through a rough patch. Charlie is wary of the ushers; though he was not at school with them and is less well-off than they are, he was invited to Will's stag do where, again, something happened. Hannah, too, feels alienated - she is not part of the wedding party, as Charlie is as a close friend of Jules, and barely sees him throughout the big day. The bride is somewhat dismissive of her, and she senses the ushers find her ridiculous and are laughing at her.

Tension slowly builds throughout the book as we are given insights into the mental states of all the protagonists. During the evening wedding party, the generator fails because of a storm and the lights go out. When the lights go back on a body is discovered and the tension escalates further. The young waitress who discovered the bloody corpse is too shocked to tell the others exactly where it was. By now we know some of the characters' secrets and more are revealed as the hunt for the body gets underway.

This is a gripping novel with well-developed characters - many of whom are unpleasant. The denouement is shocking but somehow inevitable. There are a few coincidences but truthfully these did not bother me. Very enjoyable.

Successful magazine editor Jules is marrying TV survivalist Will in a lavish wedding on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland. But throw in an unexpected storm, Will's boorish public schoolboy chums, the bride's fragile sister, and several tragedies in the pasts of those on the guest list, and you have a recipe for a page-turning thriller. The Guest List sticks to the formula that was so successful in Foley's previous novel, The Hunting Party: take a group of unlikeable posh people, stick them somewhere remote, hint at dark deeds in their pasts, and wait for the bodies to start piling up. And it's a very effective formula. I enjoyed the development of the plot, the narrative moving back and forward in time across the wedding weekend, dropping hints all the while. And if most twists were fairly predictable, it was nevertheless enjoyable to see them unfold.

Having enjoyed 'The Hunting Party', I was pleased to be given an advance copy of this book. The same ingredients are present here - a remote location, a cast of characters with questionable pasts, plus lashings of secrets and appalling behaviour...

This story takes place over the course of two days - the day before the wedding of Will Slater and Jules Keegan and the wedding day itself. As the guests assemble on the remote island location, the secrets of the past begin to surface. The actual stormclouds begin to gather and the plot builds to a murder, although who and why are elements saved for a dramatic denouement.

This is cleverly plotted, as with Foley's previous book, and the range of different perspectives allow the reader to see lots of different things over the course of the 2 days. My only issue is that the people are all pretty awful - a range of immature ex-public schoolboys, attention seekers and oddballs. When the murder comes, it works brilliantly, although I did kind of guess bits of the solution ahead of time.

A recommended read for people who like mysteries in the Agatha Christie vein - a limited list of suspects, clever plotting and lots of hidden secrets.

It was w fast paced book to read. Full of character. Suspense. Not knowing what would happen next. Interesting to read

A great modern-day whodunit with drip-fed revelations right up to the end. The story progression using the perspective of key characters works well as does the occasional time jump.
This will be a sure-fire bestseller.
I hadn’t got around to reading The Hunting Party yet, but it’s just shot up the to-be-read pile.

I enjoyed this book.

This story is really good. Family and friends go to a remote Island for Jules and Will wedding, the story will keep you turning the pages. It is a thrilling book. so many twists and turns some i expected some i didn't.

I am liking this authors style of writing and can't wait to read more of this authors books.