The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley
My rating: 4/5 cats
i plowed through this book in a day, getting up at 3 am on my day off so i could finish it before starting my other-job work at 5 as i had planned.
as someone who values what little sleep i can scrape together, the above is what is known as a ringing endorsement.
it’s got the page-turner thing down pat—short chapters, quickchange POVs, intrigue and secrets and so many twists.
although, since this is set in paris, i suppose i should call them les rebondissements.
and the first one’s a doozy. i’m a sucker for escapist suspense novels, but reading so many of ’em has dulled my capacity for surprise, so i’m not often caught off guard by their gotchas. but that first one got me, boy, injecting a legit thrill into this thriller.
i also like the hooky tagline—your typical breakfast-club round-up of character types, with a nice little endrhyme:
the socialite—the nice guy—the alcoholic—the girl on the verge—the concierge
i don’t wanna write too much about this one, because so much depends on the discoveries along the way, but i will commend the author for breaking out of her locked-room mystery rut with this one—while most of the action occurs in the titular paris apartment, that’s just kinda the HQ of evil, and what happens in the apartment does not stay in the apartment, resulting in serious consequences.
there’s more weight to this one than The Hunting Party/The Guest List—it’s more ambitious in structure and content than the fluffy drawing room-style mysteries that preceded it, and it has a more meaningful story than fancy people getting murdered. not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s good to know she’s got more in her than reheating a been-there-done-that plot.
my final thought: that cat is a hero and deserves to be fed.
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no time to review yet, but i gotta say—and maybe this is just my patterson-overload talking—this one is leaps and bounds better than her first two agatha christie wannabes, which i enjoyed in an entertainment kind of way, even though they were basically the same book. this one is more ambitious, more surprising, more satisfying in every way, even though—trigger warning—she never feeds that cat ONCE, and it was giving me serious stress the whole time. FEED YOUR CATS, PEOPLE!
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