The Guest List
by Lucy Foley
The lights have gone out. On the night of the wedding.
Why read it
On a remote island off the coast of Ireland, a glamorous couple gathers their friends for a lavish wedding, and before the night is over the lights will fail, the storm will close in, and one of the guests will be dead.
A magazine publisher and a rising TV star marry on a windswept island where everyone has arrived carrying old grudges and buried secrets. Told through multiple guests in the run-up to the celebration and intercut with the discovery of a body, the novel peels back the picture-perfect wedding to reveal how many people had reason to want someone at it dead.
Lucy Foley followed The Hunting Party with The Guest List in 2020. It became a New York Times bestseller, was chosen as a Reese's Book Club pick, and won the Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery and Thriller that year, helping define the recent wave of closed-circle group thrillers.
- 01
A body, unnamed
What awaits is a murder revealed on page one with neither victim nor killer identified, driving the whole book's suspense.
- 02
Rotating suspects
Each narrator, the bride, the wedding planner, the plus-one, the best man, hides a motive the others cannot see.
- 03
The island as trap
The storm-cut setting seals the guests together, turning old-school seclusion into modern dread.
- 04
The past invited in
A shared secret from the groom's schooldays threads through the guest list toward the killing.
The opening blackout during the reception when a scream cuts through the marquee and the power dies in the storm.
The stag-party flashback on the island that exposes the cruelty binding the groom and his old school friends.
