The gated apartment building offers a select bunch of suspects who Jess slowly gets to know. And it looks as if someone has scrubbed something off the floor using bleach. Inside, still no Ben, only a cat with blood on its fur.

But Jess is street-wise and manages to get inside anyway, fashioning her cheap hoop earrings into a device to pick the apartment lock. The old lady concierge isn’t very welcoming and Ben isn’t home. Jess turns up at Ben’s Paris address, an apartment in a surprisingly luxurious building with an internal courtyard garden. Her education has been minuscule which is why she’s been working in a dodgy bar. Jess however, much younger and evidently not so charming, went from foster family to foster family, forever scarred by being the one to find their mother’s dead body. Ben who could charm anybody was quickly adopted and enjoyed the spoils of doting parents and a good education. The two were separated as children when their mother killed herself. She’s done something she shouldn’t have and hopped on the train for Paris to crash with her brother Ben. In The Paris Apartment, Jess is on the run from her job in England. She’s seen a setting and wondered who lives or works there, like we all do, and then wondered what if there was a murder. We’ve had a wedding venue on an island in The Guest List, luxury accomodation cut off by snow in The Hunting Party and here a gated apartment building in a posh part of Paris. Lucy Foley really knows how to conjure an interesting setting.

The paris apartment lucy foley review