The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley
Jess requires a new beginning. She recently quit her job under less-than-ideal circumstances and is now penniless and alone. When she asked whether she might stay with her half-brother Ben for a short while, he didn’t seem very happy, but he didn’t say no, and undoubtedly things will look better from Paris. Could Ben truly have financed this only when she arrived, finding a really good apartment? He is not present.
Jess becomes increasingly interested in her brother’s plight and becomes more curious as time goes on and Ben remains gone. The people that live next door to Ben are a diverse group and not the friendliest. While Jess might have travelled to Paris to get away from her past, it now seems more likely that Ben’s future is in jeopardy.
The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley
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Visitors to Paris spend days seeing the city’s museums, dining on delectable treats, browsing chic and quirky stores, and moving on foot to the next tourist attraction. But in this book, our young protagonist, who is travelling to Paris with her brother, finds herself thrust into the middle of a complicated mystery. She doesn’t comprehend the dynamics of the classes, doesn’t speak French, and surely doesn’t know what happened to her brother to prevent him from being there to welcome her.
The characters are well-developed, the settings are so vividly described that you can actually see and smell them, and the sense of foreboding keeps growing. When Jess goes to visit her older half-brother Ben at a stunning old apartment building in Paris only to discover that he has suddenly vanished, she immediately senses that something is wrong. She settles into his third-floor apartment and makes an effort to get to know the other residents, including the snooty socialite who lives in the penthouse, the strange Mimi, the inebriated Antoine, Ben’s former roommate Nick, and the vigilant concierge. She grows increasingly suspicious that one of them may know more about Ben’s disappearance than they are admitting as she learns more about them all and their secrets. When she comes across a story that Ben was looking into, the puzzle pieces start to slowly come together.
The apartment has an eerie sense to it that gives it the appearance of a “country manor mystery,” but in a more modern environment. It appears very isolated from the streets of Paris around it. When Jess does go outside, Foley is able to convey the energy of Paris, including that of its more affluent neighbourhoods and that of a global metropolis, as well as glimpses of an ugly side with turbulence and violence.
