Scribd Logo

Language

Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

Enjoy millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and more, with a free trial

Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

The Paris Apartment
The Paris Apartment
The Paris Apartment
Audiobook12 hours

The Paris Apartment

Written by Lucy Foley

Narrated by Clare Corbett, Daphne Kouma, Charlie Anson and

3.5/5

()

Switch to ebook

About this audiobook

*The No.1 New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller*

Discover the new murder mystery thriller from the No.1, million-copy bestseller, Lucy Foley

‘Dazzling’ The Times
‘Compelling, up-all-night reading’ Erin Kelly
‘Atmosphere you can cut with a knife’Alex Michaelides
‘Gloriously twisty’ Ruth Ware
‘Combines edge-of-your-seat tension with out-and-out Parisian chic’ Adele Parks

_________________________________________________________________

In a beautiful old apartment block, deep in the backstreets of Paris, secrets are stirring behind every resident’s door.

The lonely wife
The party animal
The curtain-twitcher
The secret lover
The watchful caretaker
The unwanted guest

There was a murder here last night.
Who holds the key to the mystery of apartment three?

_________________________________________________________________

What readers are saying about The Paris Apartment:

‘One to devour entirely in one delicious sitting. Stupendous’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Twisty and mysterious and surprising’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Had me gripped right from the beginning’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Has “book of the year” written all over it’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘A page-turner with an amazing setting’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘A fabulously tense and mysterious read!’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Paris Apartment was a New York Times No.1 bestseller for w/e 06/03/2022

The Guest List was a Sunday Times No.1 bestseller for w/c 14/09/2022

The Guest List was the Goodreads Choice Awards winner for Crime & Mystery 2020

Editor's Note

Eerie atmosphere…

When Jess Hadley’s brother ends up missing, she asks the tenants of his creepy, but once elegant apartment building about his whereabouts and each one deflects her questions. She soon finds out the building tenants are members of the same family who share a dark secret. Between the eerie atmosphere and quickly-paced plot, Foley sweeps readers away on an exciting thrill ride through Paris with plenty of unexpected twists and turns.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins UK Audio
Release dateMar 3, 2022
ISBN9780008385026
Author

Lucy Foley

Lucy Foley studied English liter­ature at Durham University and University College London and worked for several years as a fiction edi­tor in the publishing industry. She is the author of five novels including The Guest List and The Hunt­ing Party. She lives in London.

More audiobooks from Lucy Foley

Related to The Paris Apartment

Related audiobooks

Related podcast episodes

Related articles

  • Article

    J.K. Rowling's Newest Book Criticized For A Reportedly Transphobic Plot Line

    Sep 15, 2020

    J.K. Rowling has apparently created yet another Horcrux - this time in the form of her new novel "Troubled Blood." According to a review of the book published Sunday in The Telegraph, "Troubled Blood," published under her alias Robert Galbraith, cent

    2 min read

  • Article

    Home Before Dark

    Apr 2, 2020

    Home Before Dark
    1 min read

  • Article

    Ten Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Virginia Woolf

    Mar 18, 2019

    The outward facts of her life are well-documented, but the priority she gives to the inward life, to what lies obscured in night and shadow, leaves much yet unknown. The post Ten Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Virginia Woolf appeared first o

    5 min read

  • Article

    Constructing A Medieval Castle Today

    Nov 1, 2022

    Constructing A Medieval Castle Today
    4 min read

  • Article

    3 Page-turners

    Oct 7, 2020

    This is the third novel from Sydneysider Tania Blanchard inspired by her German grandmother’s tales, and we start in Australia in 2019 with a letter from Berlin. It’s about a deceased estate and its recipient is the biological daughter of the letter

    1 min read

  • Article

    ‘Nothing Is Too Big To Fail’: Steve Toussaint On Starring In The Game Of Thrones Prequel

    Aug 19, 2022

    For years, Steve Toussaint has carved out a niche as one of television’s most reliably anonymous character actors. Since his first major TV role, a bit-part in the mid-90s police drama Backup, he has appeared in pretty much everything going. He was i

    6 min read

  • Article

    Katherine Heigl

    Jan 15, 2021

    Katherine Heigl
    1 min read

  • Article

    Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2021 Book Preview

    Jul 15, 2021

    We've just an entered an amazing six-month stretch for book-lovers. The post Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2021 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

    47 min read

  • Article

    The Tangled World of Bodies

    Jul 26, 2017

    The Tangled World of Bodies
    5 min read

  • Article

    Testing For Intolerances

    May 5, 2021

    Testing For Intolerances
    3 min read

  • Article

    A Year in Reading: Steph Opitz

    Dec 17, 2018

    I put down a lot of books that didn’t do it for me, and shuffled and reshuffled my to-be-read pile to my heart’s content. It’s been liberating. The post A Year in Reading: Steph Opitz appeared first on The Millions.

    6 min read

  • Article

    Women’s Prize for Fiction Names 2019 Longlist

    Mar 4, 2019

        Previously known as the Bailey’s Prize for Fiction (2013-2016) and the Orange Prize for Fiction (1996-2012), the Women’s Prize for Fiction announced its 2019 shortlist today. The award, created in the wake of a 1991 all-male Booker Prize shortlis

    1 min read

Reviews for The Paris Apartment

3.5/5

458 ratings30 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • 4/5
    Creepy and disturbing page-turner with a too-quick, too-convenient, disappointingly written ending. The tension builds and builds, and then…pbbbbbpppptttt. But entertaining enough.
  • 4/5
    Jess goes to Paris to stay with her half-brother, Ben, but when she arrives, he is not there. Jess begins to realize that he has gone missing, and that the apartment building where he lives has a strange cast of characters that are closer than apartment mates should be. There is Sophie in the penthouse, Mimi on 4, Nick on 2, and Antoine on 1, plus a concierge. Ben's apartment is on 3. The more Jess learns about the people in the building and Ben's disappearance, the more she believes she is in danger. This is a thriller told partly in flashback, with a bit more of the story being revealed as each person tells their tale. By the end, it is neatly wrapped up, with justice being served appropriately.
  • 4/5
    Awesome book-I really enjoy an amateur sleuth angle! It kept me captivated until the end! Narrators were great.
  • 4/5
    Loved the twists and turns! Once I got into it, it was a most enjoyable read.
  • 5/5
    I was a bit unsure whether I would enjoy this book when I started it - I often don’t do well with stories that go back-and-forth in time and between characters, finding them difficult to follow. Not the case with “The Paris Apartment”. I got into this easily, and quickly became invested in Jess’s mission to find her brother, trying to work out which characters were trustworthy, just as she did. This book only became more and more thrilling as it went along and more secrets were revealed. Loved it! Now onto more Lucy Foley thrillers…
  • 1/5
    I found this book too dark for my taste. The family was so dysfunctional. Sorry.
  • 4/5
    Really enjoyed this Story! Brilliant description of characters. Never thought I would enjoy a first person narration of each character but it totally works. Storyline and plot are full of twists too. Highly recommended book.
  • 4/5
    I love the story, the pilot twists, it left me at the edge of my seat, I really enjoyed the book, and find audacious the structure of the narrative, however having too many narrators specially in the beginning when the reader is not used to the characters makes it a bit confusing.
  • 3/5
    I absolutely loved the guest list and the hunting party.. unfortunately this one barely kept my interest... i thought about giving up a few times but I persisted to the end. I'm still not 100% sure what happened I switched off a lot...
  • 3/5
    Fast moving but a little bit daft. Not on par with The Hunting Party or The Guest List.

    Good narration grom the cast.
  • 2/5
    Dull and very unexciting. It was missing a little something.
  • 4/5
    This was a great story.
    There is a problem with the audio in chapter 70 where it skips a chunk, not sure how much, and then the chapters are out of whack. Would be great if it was fixed.

    1 person found this helpful

  • 1/5
    This is probably the worst book I have read in the last 15 years during which I have read over 700 books. Hard to believe that this author has a great reputation for this genre. A mystery should be a mystery with somewhat believable plot twists. The writing style should be pleasant and keep your interest. This book was set in Paris and Foley kept using French phrases and then translating them immediately afterword. 368 pages of this!! Jess the main character had no back story to support her ability to search for his missing half brother. How anyone could think that this was a thriller. Also the portrayal of Paris as this dark place with danger behind every corner was totally not the Paris I know. I finished it trying to see if it could be saved but the ending was ridiculous. DON'T READ THIS BOOK!!!!

    1 person found this helpful

  • 4/5
    This is a pretty good thriller. I do get a bit tired of weak lead female characters and some of the twists were predictable, but all in all it held my attention well and the ending was unexpected.
  • 4/5
    Dark and creepy with a whole bunch of strange and unlikeable people. I liked Jess who has the unenviable task of living with these horrible people in order to find out what happened to her brother, Ben. This slow-burn story is twisty and complicated. It jumps back and forth between timelines and points of view of different characters. I listened to the audiobook and I loved the ensemble cast narration. I enjoyed The Paris Apartment but it's slightly darker and uglier than I would normally enjoy and I found myself needing to shake it off after I'd finished it.
  • 4/5
    A suspenseful thriller which will have the reader second guessing what happened to Ben, British journalist. His sister, Jess, comes to visit he is missing. She begins to question the occupants of the other apartments but no one is forth coming on the last time they saw Ben. The closer Jess comes to finding the truth about Ben. Each chapter of the book is the narrative of one of the apartment dwellers or Jess.
  • 3/5
    Over the top but it was fast paced and with the short chapters was easy to read but ultimately forgettable. Excellent narration by cast.

    1 person found this helpful

  • 4/5
    I was not impressed by this novel at first, but s the story progressed things became more and more twisted and surprising. Jess goes to stay with her brother in Paris, but finds he has disappeared. Everyone in his upscale apartment house seems suspect. The deeper she digs, the stranger they seem to be.
  • 3/5
    Very interesting, glues the reader to an amazing curiosity of what's next, absolutely love it and can recommend it. It took me back to my school days where reading novels was a tradition and I look forward to reading more.
  • 3/5
    While Foley adroitly managed a style characterized by first-person narratives and a mixture of flipping to the distant past, recent times and the present in a previous novel (The Guest List, 2020), I disliked her use of this structure in The Paris Apartment. The story was too broken up with discontinuity and didn't flow well enough to keep my interest.Aside from the style fumble, the characters were shallow with little development through the novel, along with a stagnant plot until well into the the last quarter of the book. My curiosity, and a sense that one of the characters had not been murdered though the reader was pointedly led to think so , were the primary reasons I even finished the book. The ending was only "okay" because other developments were left unfulfilled (Jess's relationship with Theo, the potential for some closure for other main characters, especially Sophie and her gaining some freedom). I think the author could have pulled a stronger narrative together considering her plot had a great theme of good trouncing evil and a release of angst for the Jess-Ben backstory.
  • 4/5
    Lucy Foley writes outstanding mystery thrillers and she’s back with one that meets the expectations set by the previous books. Jess arrives in Paris to find her brother missing. He’s offered her a place to live while she gets her life together. She can get into her brother's apartment and finds there’s a creepy secret hidden by the family who lives there. The more she looks for the answer to her missing brother the more she finds herself in danger with no idea who to believe. And when she discovers the secret the wealthy family who lives in the apartment building is hiding, it becomes front page news in the Paris papers.
  • 2/5
    OTT; my disbelief could not remain suspended.
  • 4/5
    Well, I was on board with the sort of spooky theme of the book until it all unraveled at the end. Not the way I thought it would go. Melodramatic.
  • 3/5
    This book has one hell of a hook and will keep you guessing. Even when I correctly guessed some of the parts there were twists on top of that so I was constantly surprised. Not quite as strong as her first thriller, The Guest List, but still a solid read that will keep readers engaged. When Jess needs to get away from her life for a bit she calls up her brother and asks to crash at his Paris apartment. He reluctantly agrees to allow her to stay, but when she arrives at his apartment building he is not there to let her in. Where has he gone? She finagles her way into the apartment eventually, and is shocked to see the cat covered in blood and a strong smell of bleach in the apartment. Whatever happened to her brother probably isn't good. She decides to start asking the people in the surrounding apartments if they know anything, but things keep taking weirder turns. What is going on? Twisty and dark. Some elements are easy to suss out and others are completely surprising.
  • 4/5
     A good vacation read, but I didn’t like it as much as The Guest List. A twisty thriller with some good surprises, but it was missing a character to root for. They were all so self-absorbed and broken it was hard to care about what happened to them. It was a quick read though and kept me interested.
  • 4/5
    I suspect all of us have experienced that delicious serendipity of picking a book up more or less by chance and finding that it is both engrossing and entertaining. I discovered lucy Foley’s book in just such a way. I found myself faced with an unexpected long train journey ahead of me and, knowing that I had almost finished the book I was currently reading, I resorted to the small shop at the station to see if I could find some form of Red Cross parcel to tide me over. The selection of books on offer was conspicuous by its paucity, but it did include a copy of Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party, the cover of which was strewn with the sort of sensationalist encomia that would normally put me off completely. Reluctantly seeing it a faut de mieux option I bought it, expecting to find it at odds with my normal taste.Well, I was completely wrong, and within a few pages I was absolutely hooked. It offered an intriguing suspense story, offered from several different characters’ perspective and full of surprising plot twists. As a consequence, I read her next novel, The Guest List, which I found equally entertaining,The Paris Apartment follows a similar format, with the story revealed in narratives from various characters, and there is a copious offering of tangential plot twists. The story is well put together, and the reader quickly builds up an empathy for Jess, the lead protagonist, who has fled from her chaotic life in Brighton to spend some time with her half-brother Benjamin, who has recently moved into a chic apartment in a building in one of the smarter areas of Paris. When she arrives there, however, there is no sign of Benjamin, and she finds that the other inhabitants of the building are far from welcoming of this English stranger.Jess is certainly a great character – resourceful and stalwart, and showing a great capacity to rebound from the numerous adversities that life has thrown her way. However, I was less convinced by any of the other characters. Similarly, I found the plot slightly less coherent than those of her previous books. I felt almost as if the writer was more concerned with surprising the reader than in developing a strong story.But despite those slight misgivings, I still enjoyed the book, and its grip was such that I kept reading far later than I should have done. If I had read this one first, I would still have been keen to find any other books that Ms Foley had written. It simply lacked a little of the stellar impact of the earlier two.
  • 4/5
    I've enjoyed Lucy Foley's previous books and was eager to listen to her newest - The Paris Apartment.Jess needs to get away from her life in England. She calls her half brother Ben to see if she can stay with him in Paris for awhile and he reluctantly agrees. But when she arrives at his apartment building, he's not there and he's not answering his phone either. When she knocks on the neighbors' doors, the other residents of the building say they haven't seen him. They're definitely not a friendly bunch...."The socialite – The nice guy – The alcoholic – The girl on the verge – The concierge. Everyone's a neighbor. Everyone's a suspect. And everyone knows something they’re not telling."Well, I was hooked from the opening chapters! The Paris Apartment has that 'locked room' mystery feel to it - a premise I quite like. The apartment itself is older and that added to the ambiance. And yes, there's a cellar and an attic.....Jess is tenacious in her hunt for Ben and I was firmly behind her. (But she's much braver than I would be!) Each resident of the building is given a voice - including Ben. And so the listener becomes privy to information that Jess doesn't have as she tries to locate Ben.The journey to the final pages is on a dark and twisted road. Foley's plotting is clever, keeping the listener on their toes. Another great book from Foley!I really enjoyed having a cast present The Paris Apartment. The narrators were Clare Corbett, Daphne Kouma, Julia Winwood, Sope Dirisu, Sofia Zervudachi and Charlie Anson. I'm not sure who did what role, but they all were excellent. The book takes place in Paris and the French accents were perfect, yet easy to understand. The voices employed suited the characters being played. Jess had a nice, low tone to her voice that drew the listener to her. The dangerous players all showed that threat with their voices. The tension of the plot was easily presented. For me, I know I always feel drawn into a story when I listen. And that was most definitely the case with The Paris Apartment.
  • 5/5
    This book! This book y’all! I know so many reader friends have The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley as one of your can’t wait books of 2022. Less than a week until you can get your copy on 2/22/22 (love that date!) and it’s so, so good! In need of a new start Jess heads to Paris to stay with her half brother Ben. She doesn’t remember a yes when she asked, but it wasn’t a no. When Jess arrives something, everything, is off. Ben is missing, living in a flat far too upscale for a journalist writing restaurant reviews, and the neighbors are all hiding something. Told from alternating points of view, as Jess tries to find Ben we begin to learn what he was doing there, who lives in the building, his relationship to each of them, and how they connect. There’s a man missing but a lot of other questions. Is anything, or anyone, what they seem? How do you define and redefine yourself, others? How tight are the bonds of family and how do we define them? What will we forsake of ourselves, of others, to illuminate (or hide) the truth?In this closed door mystery Lucy Foley does a phenomenal job pacing, building each character, revealing information in a nonlinear way so the reader never feels quite at ease. The major twists do not come when you expect leaving you coasting when you anticipate a cliff, and without footing when you thought you were just connecting minor points. It’s expertly done making this unputdownable! I loved every minute. I give this my highest recommendation for lovers of thrillers and suspense, fiction readers who love whodunnit, and buddy reads because you’re going to want to talk about this with someone!My sincere thanks to William Marrow who kindly sent me an Advanced Reader Copy and the opportunity to read and review The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley. All opinions are my own.
  • 4/5
    The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley is a 2022 William Morrow publication. Jess contacts her half-brother, Ben, who is living in Paris, asking to be allowed to come for a visit. Though the timing is not the best, he agrees, but when Jess arrives at his apartment, Ben is nowhere to be found. It is odd that he wasn’t home to greet her- and strange that she wasn’t allowed into his apartment by the usual means. Jess slyly works her way inside of Ben's apartment, but becomes more and more concerned when Ben never shows up. Naturally, she turns to the other residents, hoping to find out when or where Ben was last seen, and by whom. But she seems to make Ben’s neighbors very uncomfortable, as they barely tolerate Jess, her probing questions and the insinuation into their lives and explosive secrets… This latest endeavor by Lucy Foley is a very slow burn, but the atmosphere is so thick I found myself immersed in the story, despite the seeming lack of real progress. Once the pieces are carefully placed, though, one sick, twisted story emerges out the murky depths that is well the worth the time it took to get there. Overall, this is a very well-written, absorbing mystery, and for me, is another winner for Lucy Foley!!
  • 3/5
    This was a slow-moving psychological thriller. It just didn't click with me for some reason - I didn't hate the book but I also wouldn't go out of my way to read it or recommend it. I didn't really connect with the characters and found all of them to be very unlikeable. I would have liked more of a backstory for Jess and Ben. That being said the writing is good and I am sure Lucy Foley fans will enjoy it. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.