The Paris apartment (by Lucy Foley)

(Amazon UK link)

I hadn’t heard of Lucy Foley, although she's apparently a best-selling author. Most likely I would not have picked up her thriller ‘The Paris Apartment’, as that’s not my usual preferred genre of reading. But it was allocated for this month’s book club, and I was able to find it inexpensively for my Kindle. So I’ve been reading it over the past week or so.

There’s a dramatic start to the book.  Jess, a young woman travelling on her own, arrives at her brother’s apartment block in Paris. She hasn’t seen him in a while, but has nowhere else to go. She spoke to him earlier in the day, and he gave his address, and also explained how to get in. He wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about her coming to visit, but clearly was expecting her.

But he’s not there. He doesn’t answer his phone, and doesn’t respond when she presses the buzzer to his flat. She tries asking people she sees, but nobody helps at all - and her French is minimal, so she’s not sure anyone understands. Finally she is able to see the code someone else uses to get into the area, and when she gets to the third floor, she picks her brother’s lock. 

And he’s not there. 

I thought it a very well-written start to the book, quite tense and beginning with a situation that would have taxed almost anyone. 

Jess discovers that Ben hasn’t taken his wallet, so he can’t have just popped out to shop. She's annoyed at first, thinking he must have forgotten about her. But as the days pass, she not just puzzled, but becomes worried that something may have happened to him. She tries every possible means of contacting him, with no result. 

She tries to speak to different residents of the building, but finds them oddly unhelpful. And rather than being all written from Jess's viewpoint, it switches from chapter to chapter. It works well, seeing different people's viewpoints, although the voices are all very similar. 

There’s Nick, a likeable young man, who was a friend of Ben’s, but he insists he knows nothing. There’s Mimi, a rather nervous young woman who seems friendly and yet withdraws at any hint of trying to push for answers. There’s an angry young man called Antoine on the ground floor, and in the penthouse is Sophie, a glamorous, perfectly made up woman, whose husband isn’t currently at home. 

There’s also the concierge, who lives a spartan life in a small cottage separate from the main block of flats, and who observes everything that’s going on. Mostly she is ignored, so she isn’t entirely sure how to deal with someone like Jess who tries to befriend everyone.

I thought the book started well, throwing Jess into a stressful and unexpected situation. It shows her as a - basically - kind person, although she’s evidently running away from something she should not have done. However I felt the residents of the apartment block appeared rather too quickly and it wasn’t easy to remember who was whom. They’re distinct individuals but there isn’t much characterisation to any of them. 

And there’s my problem with the book, really. I did hope things would work out for Jess eventually, but she never feels entirely three-dimensional, and everyone else in the book feels very flat. There are some tense situations, but it was hard for me to feel any kind of stress - and that’s unusual, as I’m easily spooked by fictional tension and thrillers.  But after the dramatic opening, not much happens for quite a lengthy section of the book. 

In the second half of the book the story gets going, after Jess seems to have come to a brick wall in her searches. There’s a local journalist after a story, a seedy night club, a shocking article on a computer, some surprising revelations about the residents of the flats, and more. Throughout I thought it was a well-written plot, but couldn’t care much about any of the people. 

The ending should have been quite exciting, but although I kept reading - sometimes a bit compulsively - and the chapters are short, I only really felt relief when everything was resolved and the book ended. There’s a bit of a twist,  when Jess thinks she’s found out something and we learn quite quickly that the ‘clues’ in the book actually lead to a rather different scenario. But by that stage I didn’t much care. 

Since I find some thrillers very stressful to read (and generally avoid them) it’s perhaps a good thing that I didn’t find most of this book particularly tense. I quite liked the cultural references, and Jess’s rather poor attempts at speaking French. And I thought the plot was well constructed and the writing nicely paced. But since the characters did nothing for me emotionally, it’s not a book I’m likely to read again.

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