Review: After that ending to The Guest List, little could keep me away from Lucy Foley's next book - and starting right off on the creepy/claustrophobic side, The Paris Apartment opens with a young woman named Jess, newly-arrived in Paris from England, who's escaping from both life in London and the not-so-brilliant circumstances under which she left her last bartending job. She's shown up at the Paris apartment house of her older half-brother Ben, contacting him on very short notice so he couldn't exactly turn her away, and upon her arrival Jess feels something's more than a bit wrong. For one, Ben doesn't answer her attempts to enter the building gate, not her texts or calls. Then the tenant she does manage to sneak in behind anyway comes off even more creepy than the dark, foreboding four-story apartment building itself. Worse, when she finally makes her way to Ben's apartment on the third floor (it's just one apartment per floor), Jess soon learns that Ben is missing - and the more she digs into the situation, his neighbors, and Ben's too-quiet apartment itself, the more she realizes that something very, very bad might have happened to her half-brother ... and she might be next. Foley is an expert at creating super-creepy atmosphere, which was crawling up my neck by page 10, and though sometimes you may want to yell, "Woman, what are you DOING?" to Jess as she seemingly puts herself in harm's way, that's also a sign of caring enough about the character to feel that way at all, right? The other building tenants have their own secrets to hide - and, in some cases, will go to extraordinary lengths to hide them - and yes, the plot builds into one big twist I didn't see coming, partway through, that made the book, at least for me, hard to put down from then on. Though I was able to guess the end "twist" a bit early, and the finale itself comes off maybe a tiny big anti-climactic at first, it's a satisfying ending that, overall, makes this one a bit stronger, I think, than The Guest List. Shut your brain off for a bit, and just enjoy this suspenseful, more complex-than-expected thrill ride that's as fun as a rollercoaster, with nearly as many curves. 4/5 stars
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