A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST THRILLERS OF THE YEAR “I loved this book. It gave me the same waves of happiness I get from curling up with a classic Christie...The alternating points of view keep you guessing, and guessing wrong.” — Alex Michaelides, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient "Evok[es] the great Agatha Christie classics…Pay close attention to seemingly throwaway details about the characters’ pasts. They are all clues.” -- New York Times Book Review A wedding celebration turns dark and deadly in this deliciously wicked and atmospheric thriller reminiscent of Agatha Christie from the New York Times bestselling author of The Hunting Party. The bride – The plus one – The best man – The wedding planner – The bridesmaid – The body On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed. But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride’s oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast. And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?

While a couple of us had fun in a trashy way reading Foley's take on this classic Orient Express style mystery, most of us thought the book was boring, predictable, and pointless. David pointed out that it was essentially an inverted whodunnit where we had a lot of suspects but didn't find out the victim until almost the end of the book. There was also an interesting relationship that Foley explored between the younger sister of the bride and the best man's plus one that yielded a couple of nice conversations bridging age differences. Beyond that though, there was nothing to recommend here. The writing lacked vision and none of the descriptions gave any further insight or power to the story. The plot was very contrived, in that the villain of the story had to be obliquely responsible for basically every bad thing that happened in the book so that there would be a plausible motive for everyone, and that strained credulity so much that many of us actually laughed at the book's conclusion. But the biggest issue is that we didn't believe any of the characters or their motivations. Foley just didn't see to get the main figures in the world of celebrity and wealth she depicted, and so their motivations just seemed cartoony. Do powerful women actually choose to act awfully tactically and then openly express pride in being awful? Do kids actually torture each other overtly and then laugh it off with bad jokes? Does anyone actually make up weird chant drinking songs in the 21st century? It all seemed like a caricature of bad rich people in stereotypically abusive private schools, where everyone is horrible to each other and no one actually has any ethics. It's just ridiculous from the choice of setting to the execution of the murder. I guess if you don't need a book to be believable at all and you don't mind reading a first third of a book that's just picture after picture of gross humans, you could get a laugh out of The Guest List, but otherwise, just take our word for it and RSVP no to this story.