(See also: The residents’ love of spying on one another through windows and secretly listening at doorways hints at an enjoyably Rear Window-esque kind of voyeurism.) Which it does, though the end result ends up feeling something more akin to Alfred Hitchock than Christie.
And then there’s the mysterious woman known only as “The Concierge,” whose sole job appears to be to serve as a literal gatekeeper to the building itself.įoley’s fresh spin on classic Agatha Christie-style locked room mysteries in her previous novels The Hunting Party and The Guest List has rightly won her praise from readers, but fans should be prepared to know going in that The Paris Apartment alters this familiar formula a bit, spreading its story out into the streets of Paris and relying on the complex web of characters at its center to hold things together when the story moves outside its primary location. Mimi (“the girl on the verge”) is an isolated young twenty-something woman with anxiety and trust issues.
Antoine (“the alcoholic”) thinks Ben might be having an affair with his wife. Wealthy housewife Sophie (“the socialite”) lives in the building’s penthouse and has the controlling sort of husband that means she’ll never be able to tell him about the blackmail threats she’s been getting. There’s Nick (“the nice guy”), Ben’s friend from university who helped set him up at his current address in the first place but now seems to regret their reunion. Ben’s neighbors run the gamut from rude and unhelpful, to downright suspicious and even occasionally sinister, and most of them aren’t exactly likable figures, but their stories eventually dovetail in increasingly compelling and surprising ways. Naturally, she’s determined to figure out what went down-Ben is many sometimes sketchy things but she doesn’t believe he would have bailed on her so completely-a quest that may end up putting her in more danger than she could have ever predicted.įeeling a bit like a darker take on Only Murders in the Building, The Paris Apartment revolves around the residents of number 12, rue des Amants, shifting between the perspectives of several different characters as Jess tries to get a handle on what’s happening and who her brother was to all these people. When Jess Hadley arrives in Paris to visit her half-brother Ben (and escape an uncomfortable personal situation of her own in London), she’s surprised that he’s is nowhere to be found and that none of the neighbors in his swanky new building are terribly concerned about what’s happened to him. Arriving in the dark days of February, Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment nevertheless feels like the most entertaining sort of summer thriller, a fast-paced, twisty bit of escapism that mixes compelling, messy characters, deft narrative red herrings, shifting perspectives, and a few genuine surprises to create a story that’ll keep you up reading well into the night.
0 kommentar(er)
