The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley: Book Review
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The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley is a locked-room-style mystery set inside an old Paris apartment building full of suspicious neighbors, secrets, and one very inconvenient disappearance.
I picked it up because I was in the mood for a good mystery or thriller, and I was also curious about why reader opinions on this one seemed so divided.
It ended up being a mixed-but-mostly-positive read for me. The beginning was a little slow, but once the mystery started tightening around the residents of the building, I was hooked.
My Take: The Paris Apartment started a little slowly for me, but the short chapters, multiple viewpoints, and growing suspicion around the apartment building kept pulling me along. I especially liked the way the mystery expanded beyond Ben’s disappearance and made nearly every resident seem questionable. My Verdict? Read – especially if you like atmospheric mysteries with unreliable or suspicious characters.
What The Paris Apartment Is About
A new locked room mystery, set in a Paris apartment building. What do all these tenants have in common? And what do they have to hide?
Jess is broke, alone, and needs a fresh start because she’s just left her job under less-than-ideal circumstances. She heads to Paris to hang out with her half-brother Ben for a while. Ben didn’t sound thrilled when she asked if she could crash with him for a bit, but he didn’t say no, and she figured everything would look much better from Paris.
Only when she shows up in Paris, Ben’s apartment seem nicer than what he can probably afford, and Ben has gone missing.
Jess starts to dig into her brother’s situation, and the more she digs, the more questions she has. Ben’s neighbors are a shady bunch, and not particularly friendly. Jess may have come to Paris to escape her past, but it’s starting to look like it’s Ben’s future that’s in question.
Where is Ben?
Do any of these tenants know what happened to him? Things start to escalate out of control the more Jess questions the neighbors. Can she trust any of them?
The Paris Apartment – What I Liked
A Paris setting – what’s not to like about that? Although, I must say that I didn’t really feel much of the essence of Paris in this book. It could almost have been set anywhere.
The short chapters and constantly shifting viewpoints made the book feel fast-paced, even when the story itself was moving more slowly.
All in all, the point of view rotates between six different characters who are telling the story, and sometimes they flash back to something that happened at an earlier point in time. Some of them have a much more prominent role and show up more frequently than others.
In addition, there are a few other characters that are part of the story, but who don’t tell the story from their point of view.
I thought the story moved along quite quickly because of the way it was told through all the different viewpoints. It certainly kept me quite engaged in the book.
The main premise of the book is that the main character, Jess, is in Paris to visit her brother Ben, who subsequently goes missing by the time she arrives in Paris. At the beginning of the book, that’s really where my focus stayed. But what I loved is that as the book progressed, you saw that there was some mystery there involving her brother Ben, his apartment, and all the tenants of the building he lived in. That mystery just kept building more and more as the book went on.
And finally, we were treated to an interesting twist at the end, and I didn’t quite see it coming.
The Paris Apartment – What I Didn’t Like
The biggest issue for me was the slow start. Even though the short chapters kept me reading, the mystery itself took a while to really get moving.
I also wanted more of Paris. Aside from the old apartment building, the setting could almost have been anywhere. That’s not a flaw in the mystery itself, but personally, if you give me Paris in the title, I want a little more Paris.
The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley – Read, Reread, or Reconsider?
And now, for my three Rs of book reviews. Should you read, reread, or reconsider reading The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley?
Read
The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley – Conclusion
If you like mysteries with shady characters, multiple viewpoints, and an enclosed setting where almost everyone seems to be hiding something, The Paris Apartment is worth reading.
The first half was slower than I expected, but once the mystery deepened, I became much more invested. By the end, the twists and secrets surrounding the apartment building had completely pulled me in.
If The Paris Apartment leaves you wanting to try another Lucy Foley mystery, The Guest List is an obvious next choice. It was Reese’s Book Club’s June 2020 pick and features another closed-circle mystery with plenty of suspicious characters.
