Chronic fuck-up Jess has once again chronically fucked something up, so she decides to do the only sensible thing she can: hightail it to the French capital, where her brother resides. Her brother has assured her she’s always welcome in that way people have when they don’t mean it, but though Jess isn’t expecting a particularly warm welcome, she’s surprised that her brother is nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, she lets herself into his fancy apartment, hoping he’ll come home soon. He doesn’t, and soon Jess begins to suspect the other residents of the apartment building are hiding something.
This is Foley’s third novel. Not that you can really tell, because all of her books operate around the same principle: a group of people who are somehow connected get together in an isolated place. Someone dies. Whodunnit. In and of itself, it’s not a bad concept and I actually liked her first outing, The Hunting Party. The idea of replacing literal isolation – a remote hunting lodge – for something less literal – isolation through a language barrier, finances, the social isolation that comes with urban areas – is an interesting one, and I was surprised by how badly executed this is. Foley can write; she’s no Shakespeare, but she’s better than this. The problem is that she tries to juggle so many characters and so many events that the whole thing becomes a convoluted mess. The plot ambles along with so many twists and turns that it ends up tripping over its own feet.
Meanwhile, all character development goes out the window. Jess is the tough foster care kid, her brother Ben is the well-educated charmer. There’s the Journalist, The Drunkard, The Rich Asshole, The Fancy Parisienne, The Troubled Artist. And that’s it; that’s where their personalities begin and end. The city itself isn’t really utilised as a backdrop as much as it could have been, though it’s made very clear that the food is, indeed, excellent. I guess Foley was hungry when she wrote this.
I didn’t hate reading the novel, and it did keep me guessing, but the plot is both overcomplicated and it rests entirely on clichés that I won’t discuss in case anyone wants to read this book. But it’s a shame, really. The idea of setting a mystery in a fancy Parisian apartment building where everyone has something to hide is a good one, but instead all the characters suffer from an overstuffed plot; aside from the central mystery, there are several unrelated backstories, none of them good or remotely interesting. The central mystery is kind of a dud, mostly because it’s just one of those ludicrous things that keep popping up in third rate thrillers. This book needed a good editor to prune the side branches. The balance is missing, the execution is uninspired, and that’s a shame.