Lead Review
- Book: The Paris Apartment
- Location: Montmartre
- Author: Lucy Foley
3.75*
Who doesn’t love a mystery set in Paris?!
Jess arrives late one evening to stay with her estranged brother in his apartment at 12 rue des Amants, where he is lodging for the time being (his friend, Nick, from University has facilitated his stay and Nick also lives in the apartment block). Upon arrival, Ben doesn’t appear to be home. Jess knows that he can be self focussed but she doesn’t believe he would forget her imminent arrival. Her antennae are immediately quivering.
She and Ben were adopted by different families in their younger years, and so they grew up on different sides of the track (she underprivileged, he moving in higher echelons). However, he did at one point helpfully teach her how to pick locks, and soon she has let herself into the apartment block and found her way into his flat, where she is greeted by his cat, and some blood, and the broken chain of his treasured St Christopher necklace. No sign of him, however. She just knows that something untoward has happened and sets out on a quest to ascertain his fate. On her mission, she comes to meet the other households in the various apartments, a quirky and generally hostile lot of individuals, all looked after by a wizened concierge, who hangs out in her tiny concierge room, keeping an eye on proceedings, like a spider in her web.
There is a cellar in the basement which houses a particularly rich selection of vintage wines, which seems to belong to the people living in the penthouse. Indeed, as she starts to piece together the secrets of the people who live there, she makes all kinds connections which drive her forward. There is one big secret she discovers fairly early on, that is alarming but very helpful to her.
The novel has a French feel, although Paris itself doesn’t really feature. I may have missed something but one significant piece of information avails itself when Jess navigates her way via Ben’s password (unknown to her) into his computer. In order to break the password, she just decides to guess and then substitute numbers for letters in the password and on her umpteenth attempt it’s bingo: it just seemed a little fortuitous that she hit the right sequence, given that they have spent years apart and don’t really know each other. She also teams up with Ben’s work acquaintance, who also enables her to progress investigations, and given both he and Ben are journalists and writers, he can cut to the chase. Again a propitious encounter for her.
I listened to this as an audiobook, and it works quite well with great voice differentiation between the characters. Each chapter is narrated from the POV of one of the characters and if they are residents, it also gives the floor number on which they live, so the characters are well chiselled and it’s easy to know who is who. The story is almost gothic in feel and the author is very good at the keeping tension going throughout. I found it pretty enjoyable.
Please wait...
