Lucy Foley books are not all created equal, and I say that as someone who has read all four of her psychological thrillers. Foley spent her twenties editing fiction at Headline Publishing Group and Hodder & Stoughton before writing three historical novels that sold modestly. The Hunting Party (2018) changed that, pivoting her into locked-setting psychological thrillers and earning her first New York Times bestseller placement. In 2026, Agatha Christie’s estate commissioned Foley to write the first new Miss Marple novel by an outside author in roughly fifty years, arriving as Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel this September. Of the four Foley thrillers I have read, The Guest List stands well above the rest (I liked it enough to reread it three years later). The other three are all good, without quite reaching that level. Here is my honest ranking of all four.
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
The Guest List (William Morrow, May 2020) takes place over a wedding weekend on a remote island off the Irish coast, where a rising television star marries a magazine publisher amid a decade of buried grudges among the wedding party. A storm cuts the island off from the mainland before the weekend ends, and one of the guests does not make it home. The novel won the Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery & Thriller in 2020, was a Reese’s Book Club pick, and sold more than three million copies worldwide. I read The Guest List for the first time in April 2020 and gave it five stars immediately. I gave it five stars again when I reread it on Kindle in 2023, which says more than any review could. I already knew who did it, and the book worked anyway. The rotating cast of narrators (bridesmaid, best man, wedding planner, plus-one) means a reread surfaces warning signs missed the first time. This is Foley’s most complete execution of the trapped-location format that defines her thrillers.
This one is for you if you want a wedding-as-pressure-cooker mystery with a twist that earns itself. Find The Guest List on Goodreads.
The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley
The Paris Apartment (William Morrow, 2022) follows Jess Hadley, who arrives in Paris expecting to crash with her half-brother Ben and finds his apartment empty, smelling of bleach, with blood on the cat’s fur. Nearly every resident in Ben’s building turns out to be hiding something, and most of them are connected to one family running an illegal operation behind a respectable front. Foley builds the novel from rotating resident perspectives, the way she does in The Guest List, but compresses the ensemble into a single building instead of a private island. I gave The Paris Apartment four stars. The locked-room structure is tighter than anything Foley had written before it, and the reveal holds up because every resident’s secret gets planted early enough to matter. It does not reach The Guest List’s five stars mostly because the sheer number of suspects inside one building asks more patience of the reader than a wedding weekend does.
This one is for you if you want Foley’s take on a classic locked-room mystery rather than a wilderness retreat. Find The Paris Apartment on Goodreads.
The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party (HarperCollins UK, 2018; William Morrow, 2019) follows a group of Oxford friends on their annual New Year trip to Loch Corrin, a wilderness lodge in the Scottish Highlands. A historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world on December 30, and by New Year’s Day, one of the group is dead. A decade of affairs, betrayals, and one friend outing another’s sexuality to his parents surfaces as the suspect list narrows. The Hunting Party was Foley’s first thriller, and it earned her first New York Times bestseller placement after three historical novels that had not sold nearly as well. I gave it three stars. It is the book that set up every device Foley has used since (the closed circle of old friends, the isolating weather, the rotating suspicion), but the execution here is more workmanlike than the books that followed it. The premise is stronger than the pacing.
This one is for you if you want to read Foley’s catalog in order and see where the format began. Find The Hunting Party on Goodreads.
The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley
The Midnight Feast (William Morrow, 2024) opens on the launch weekend of The Manor, a luxury hotel built on the Dorset coast beside an ancient forest the developer privatized over local objection. A group calling themselves the Birds surface as opposition tied to old local superstition, and journal entries from a 2010 summer intercut the present-day weekend until a fire and a body at the base of a cliff end the celebration. Foley works three timelines here instead of two, and folds in a folk-horror register she had not used in her earlier thrillers. I gave The Midnight Feast three stars, the same rating as The Hunting Party, but for a different reason. This book takes the biggest structural and genre risk of Foley’s four thrillers, and the risk does not fully land. The class-tension plot and the folk-horror plot compete for space rather than reinforcing each other.
This one is for you if you want to see Foley experiment outside her usual format, with mixed results. Find The Midnight Feast on Goodreads.
If you are new to Lucy Foley, start with The Guest List. It is both her best book and her most accessible one, and it explains why the rest of her catalog gets compared to it. I have not yet read her three early historical novels (The Book of Lost and Found, The Invitation, Last Letter from Istanbul), and Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, her Agatha Christie estate-commissioned Miss Marple novel, is not out until September 22, 2026. If you like Foley’s trapped-setting thrillers, Riley Sager is worth a look for the same claustrophobic tension. For more, my list of best thrillers for beginners covers where to start with the genre. Find me on Instagram and Goodreads — I’d love to know which one you read first.