I found an intriguing book for those of you who love murder mysteries! “The Guest List” by Lucy Foley is a great read!! The setting is a tiny island off of the coast of Ireland where a wedding is taking place. The island is known as Cormorant Island – named after cormorant birds – I looked them up and Irish folklore says that a cormorant sitting on a church steeple foretells bad luck. Also they are sometimes seen as carrying messages from the dead. The wedding guests are staying at The Folly – another word I looked up – a costly, decorative building which was originally built to provide shelter; looks very usable, but is not what it seems. So the evil and the deception are foreshadowed from the beginning! As you can probably tell from the title, there is a rather large cast of characters – and each of them narrates different chapters, allowing you to gather different points of view.
There is: Aoife (pronounced EE-fa – I looked it up!) the wedding planner and her partner, Freddie. Will and Jules – the happy couple. Olivia – sister of the bride. Charlie and his wife, Hannah – friend of the bride. Piers, Johnno, Femi, Angus, Duncan and Peter – friends of the groom. And a few other relatives and guests attending the wedding. Don’t let the list of characters put you off from reading this book though! I thought I might need to write a list in order to keep them straight, but their stories were told so well that I felt like I knew the characters and had no trouble remembering who was who. (Of course, Ms Foley makes sure you understand that every character is hiding some bit of his/her feelings or past history.)
I can’t divulge many details – don’t want to give anything away – but you do not find out who is murdered NOR who is the murderer until the end of the book. I loved the suspense of trying to figure out who might have made someone mad enough to commit the crime and I kept changing my mind about who might have been attacked. I didn’t want to put this book down and I can’t wait to hear if YOU suspected the killer before you reached the end of the book!
Leave a Reply