The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley
Jan. 4th, 2026 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
In a beautiful old apartment block, deep in the backstreets of Paris, secrets are stirring behind every resident’s door.
The lonely wife.
The party animal.
The curtain-twitcher.
The secret lover.
The watchful caretaker.
The unwanted guest.
There was a murder here last night. Who holds the key to the mystery of apartment three?
Jess Hadley isn’t close to her brother, Ben Daniels, and hasn’t been since their mum died when they were young. Ben got lucky and was adopted by a well-to-do couple who sent him to private school, from where he went to Cambridge to study modern languages. Now he works in Paris as a freelance journalist and restaurant critic, living in the same luxury apartment block as his university friend Nick Miller. Jess, however, bounced between foster homes and has been working low skilled jobs, trying to make ends meet.
When an incident at work means that Jess needs to get out of the UK quickly, Ben reluctantly offers her a place to stay. But when she finally arrives at his apartment block he doesn’t reply to her calls and she eventually gets inside to find that although his wallet and belongings all seem to be there there’s no sign of him at all; just a cat and a weird chemical smell. There’s also the fact that the voice note he was leaving for her suggests that he was in the apartment waiting for her when someone entered and cut off his call.
A worried Jess questions Ben’s neighbours to try and find out what’s happened to him but finds them a decidedly mixed bunch:
- 19-year-old Mimi and her room mate Camille are students at the Sorbonne but personality wise could not be more different. Mimi is introverted and highly-strung, reluctant to engage with Jess at all, whereas Camille is highly sexualised and extrovert;
- Ben’s friend Nick seems to be a nice guy and is keen to help. A former tech investor who used to live in California, he lives a minimalist lifestyle but Jess discovers is also addicted to oxycodone;
- Antoine is a spiteful and abusive alcoholic whose marriage to the beautiful Dominique is collapsing and making his behaviour more extreme;
- In the penthouse that she shares with her husband Jacques, is the beautiful, put together Sophie Meunier whose icy demeanour and sense of superiority makes Jess feel inferior and on the back foot all the time; and finally
- the nameless concierge who lives in a poky lodge in the courtyard and who sees and hears everything but whose only interactions with Jess have been to try and get her to leave.
What soon becomes obvious is that everyone in the apartment block is keeping secrets - secrets that bind them together and secrets that will leave Jess wondering who, exactly, she can trust …
Lucy Foley’s standalone thriller starts off strong by showing what’s happened to Ben but ultimately fails to make good on its promise through a combination of unconvincing characters and a plot that doesn’t quite hold together. For me there’s just too much going on and when the revelations come they feel contrived rather than intriguing. It is a pacy read and I kept turning the pages but I did not enjoy this as much as I have her other thrillers.
I picked this up because I’d previously read and enjoyed Foley’s earlier thrillers THE HUNTING PARTY and THE GUEST LIST. She takes the same structural approach here, splitting the action between multiple narrators - Jess, Nick, Sophie, Mimi, Ben and the Concierge - but with the exception of Jess and Sophie I found the narrating characters to be really underdeveloped. In the case of Antoine (who never rises above being an abusive, boorish alcoholic) and Mimi (a highly strung virgin who falls in obsessive love with unobtainable men) in particular I found them to be almost stereotypical with the result that I just didn’t care about them but even Jess and Sophie are thinly sketched.
In Jess’s case I think my problem came from the fact that there’s too much backstory going on both in terms of her own story and her relationship with Ben. I can see why it would be beneficial to have a contrast between Ben’s luck, privilege and social confidence and Jess’s scrappier, less educated and harder knock experiences but in Jess’s case it just doesn’t add anything. Maybe this speaks to my own prejudices but I kept expecting her to be savvier than she is in the book. Even allowing for the language difference, her only skill seems to be lock picking, which is there to help advance the plot. She’s weirdly trusting, never has a plan and kinda stumbles from situation to situation without showing a lot of agency while a sex scene towards the end of the book really didn’t make any sense to me in the context of the book or what had been shown of her character up to that point.
Sophie was, for me, better constructed. I enjoyed the slow reveal about her background and her marriage to Jacques (who is only ever seen in flashback in the book as he is currently away on a business trip) and the scenes where Foley reveals what Sophie has to do to maintain her position together with her reaction to being blackmailed are well done.
Unfortunately the plot started to become unstuck for me with a key revelation at the half-way point just because it was such a pointless development and I didn’t see why it needed to be a secret. Later revelations have a similarly hackneyed feel to them and the overall effect was to just leave me unconvinced. That’s a shame because the plot does move fairly quickly - this is a 400+ page book that doesn’t feel like a 400+ page book - and Foley does have a good eye for the life and secrets of the rich and upper classes so I kept turning the pages, even if I was not as engrossed as I wanted to be.
I still rate Foley as a thriller writer and this certainly has not put me off her work, but this book wasn’t as entertaining as THE HUNTING PARTY and THE GUEST LIST and as a result I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped to.
The Verdict:
Lucy Foley’s standalone thriller starts off strong by showing what’s happened to Ben but ultimately fails to make good on its promise through a combination of unconvincing characters and a plot that doesn’t quite hold together. For me there’s just too much going on and when the revelations come they feel contrived rather than intriguing. It is a pacy read and I kept turning the pages but I did not enjoy this as much as I have her other thrillers.
The lonely wife.
The party animal.
The curtain-twitcher.
The secret lover.
The watchful caretaker.
The unwanted guest.
There was a murder here last night. Who holds the key to the mystery of apartment three?
Jess Hadley isn’t close to her brother, Ben Daniels, and hasn’t been since their mum died when they were young. Ben got lucky and was adopted by a well-to-do couple who sent him to private school, from where he went to Cambridge to study modern languages. Now he works in Paris as a freelance journalist and restaurant critic, living in the same luxury apartment block as his university friend Nick Miller. Jess, however, bounced between foster homes and has been working low skilled jobs, trying to make ends meet.
When an incident at work means that Jess needs to get out of the UK quickly, Ben reluctantly offers her a place to stay. But when she finally arrives at his apartment block he doesn’t reply to her calls and she eventually gets inside to find that although his wallet and belongings all seem to be there there’s no sign of him at all; just a cat and a weird chemical smell. There’s also the fact that the voice note he was leaving for her suggests that he was in the apartment waiting for her when someone entered and cut off his call.
A worried Jess questions Ben’s neighbours to try and find out what’s happened to him but finds them a decidedly mixed bunch:
- 19-year-old Mimi and her room mate Camille are students at the Sorbonne but personality wise could not be more different. Mimi is introverted and highly-strung, reluctant to engage with Jess at all, whereas Camille is highly sexualised and extrovert;
- Ben’s friend Nick seems to be a nice guy and is keen to help. A former tech investor who used to live in California, he lives a minimalist lifestyle but Jess discovers is also addicted to oxycodone;
- Antoine is a spiteful and abusive alcoholic whose marriage to the beautiful Dominique is collapsing and making his behaviour more extreme;
- In the penthouse that she shares with her husband Jacques, is the beautiful, put together Sophie Meunier whose icy demeanour and sense of superiority makes Jess feel inferior and on the back foot all the time; and finally
- the nameless concierge who lives in a poky lodge in the courtyard and who sees and hears everything but whose only interactions with Jess have been to try and get her to leave.
What soon becomes obvious is that everyone in the apartment block is keeping secrets - secrets that bind them together and secrets that will leave Jess wondering who, exactly, she can trust …
Lucy Foley’s standalone thriller starts off strong by showing what’s happened to Ben but ultimately fails to make good on its promise through a combination of unconvincing characters and a plot that doesn’t quite hold together. For me there’s just too much going on and when the revelations come they feel contrived rather than intriguing. It is a pacy read and I kept turning the pages but I did not enjoy this as much as I have her other thrillers.
I picked this up because I’d previously read and enjoyed Foley’s earlier thrillers THE HUNTING PARTY and THE GUEST LIST. She takes the same structural approach here, splitting the action between multiple narrators - Jess, Nick, Sophie, Mimi, Ben and the Concierge - but with the exception of Jess and Sophie I found the narrating characters to be really underdeveloped. In the case of Antoine (who never rises above being an abusive, boorish alcoholic) and Mimi (a highly strung virgin who falls in obsessive love with unobtainable men) in particular I found them to be almost stereotypical with the result that I just didn’t care about them but even Jess and Sophie are thinly sketched.
In Jess’s case I think my problem came from the fact that there’s too much backstory going on both in terms of her own story and her relationship with Ben. I can see why it would be beneficial to have a contrast between Ben’s luck, privilege and social confidence and Jess’s scrappier, less educated and harder knock experiences but in Jess’s case it just doesn’t add anything. Maybe this speaks to my own prejudices but I kept expecting her to be savvier than she is in the book. Even allowing for the language difference, her only skill seems to be lock picking, which is there to help advance the plot. She’s weirdly trusting, never has a plan and kinda stumbles from situation to situation without showing a lot of agency while a sex scene towards the end of the book really didn’t make any sense to me in the context of the book or what had been shown of her character up to that point.
Sophie was, for me, better constructed. I enjoyed the slow reveal about her background and her marriage to Jacques (who is only ever seen in flashback in the book as he is currently away on a business trip) and the scenes where Foley reveals what Sophie has to do to maintain her position together with her reaction to being blackmailed are well done.
Unfortunately the plot started to become unstuck for me with a key revelation at the half-way point just because it was such a pointless development and I didn’t see why it needed to be a secret. Later revelations have a similarly hackneyed feel to them and the overall effect was to just leave me unconvinced. That’s a shame because the plot does move fairly quickly - this is a 400+ page book that doesn’t feel like a 400+ page book - and Foley does have a good eye for the life and secrets of the rich and upper classes so I kept turning the pages, even if I was not as engrossed as I wanted to be.
I still rate Foley as a thriller writer and this certainly has not put me off her work, but this book wasn’t as entertaining as THE HUNTING PARTY and THE GUEST LIST and as a result I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped to.
The Verdict:
Lucy Foley’s standalone thriller starts off strong by showing what’s happened to Ben but ultimately fails to make good on its promise through a combination of unconvincing characters and a plot that doesn’t quite hold together. For me there’s just too much going on and when the revelations come they feel contrived rather than intriguing. It is a pacy read and I kept turning the pages but I did not enjoy this as much as I have her other thrillers.
