The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley: book review

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley (2022) is set in Paris. This is a mystery novel focusing on the residents in one apartment building.

Twenty-eight-year-old Jess from London is visiting her 30-ish-year-old brother Benjamin Daniels in Paris. She is broke and needs a place to stay and re-group, and to forget her past.

Ben is new to the apartment building, living on the third floor. As one of the residents says, ‘After he came here, everything changed.’ And not for the better.

When Jess arrives, Ben is missing – and she sets out to find him.

The residents are not particularly helpful: the nosey concierge monitoring everyone’s movements, middle-aged Antoine on the first floor, Nick on the second, 19-year-old Mimi and her flatmate Camilla on the fourth, and Madame Sophie Meunier and her husband Jacques in the penthouse suite. All have their own secrets.

The multiple narrators keep readers informed of only so much information – the secrets are teased out gradually as the author builds anticipation and suspense.

Overall, I thought the characters needed more development, the dialogue was strange and forced, and the mystery, suspense, and intrigue were lacking from this thick book. As for Paris, it barely exists, except in name. However, it’s an easy read, a best-seller, and worth getting to the end.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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