The Guest List

The Guest List is a mystery novel by the British writer Lucy Foley, published in May 2020 and set on a remote island off the Irish coast.

The book uses a closed circle of suspects in the tradition of the country-house mystery, and it names most of the guests in turn so that each of them has a chapter to explain their own history with the bride or the groom. There is the bride's half-sister, who has been carefully left off the list of speakers; the best man, who has known Will since school; a wife whose husband has disappeared into the arrangements; and the people running the venue, whose connection to the couple is not simply professional. Foley keeps the storm, the marquee and the ruined ground of the island in the foreground, so the gathering feels precarious before anything happens, and the murder is withheld until the last part of the book. It was a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the paper's best thrillers of 2020, longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and the winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for mystery and thriller; it has sold more than a million copies across thirty territories.