Lucy Foley is an interesting author. The Midnight Feast is her seventh standalone novel, and her three previous novels have all been nominated or shortlisted for awards in the UK and overseas. I’ve read several of her books and enjoyed them, and I found this one to be pretty good – better than some of her earlier ones, in my view.
Now I see Lucy Foley been contracted to write a new Miss Marple story, to be published later this year, so I’m looking forward to finding out if she can capture the spirit of Christie’s timeless sleuth. I think she might!
The Midnight Feast is set in and around an old manor house on the Dorset coast. This house has, by its new owner, been turned into a very sumptuous hotel and wellness resort. The owner, Francesca Meadows, is a wealthy, beautiful and charismatic person and guru, with an equally charismatic architect husband, who designed and oversaw the conversion of the building.
The guests are gathering for the opening weekend in the hotel, which lies in the shadow of an ancient, mysterious and rather sinister wood. They have been promised a spectacular midnight feast. Among the guests is Bella, a woman with a secret and an agenda.
As soon as the scene is set the story jumps to the day after the feast, when a body, crushed beyond recognition, is found on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. This pattern in the story repeats itself, the reader jumps between the opening night and the day after, when the police move in, led by a rather quiet but thorough police inspector.
As the day of the feast unfolds, we learn through Bella’s thoughts what went before, why she is there and who she and Francesca really are.
In the past, the manor had been the home of Francesca’s grandparents, where she and her twin brothers came to stay each summer. During one summer, when she was 16-years-old and bored, she befriended Bella, who then went by another name and was the child of a low-income family on holiday at the nearby caravan park. Bella spent that summer at the manor and gradually saw how self-centred and single-mindedly determined Francesca really was, and how quickly and brutally she rid herself of Bella in order to make a slightly older woman from the despised village her new best friend. Bella, in the meantime, had made friends with a local boy, much to Francesca’s disgust. Sometime later a death occurs and is covered up.
All this is told in flashbacks by Bella while she moves around the Manor Hotel, watching Francesca, watching the increasingly uninhibited guests and wondering how she can bring the old, hidden and hideous death to the fore.
What happens next, I will not reveal. But it is shocking and quite unexpected; and actually worth reading the book for.
My verdict
The Midnight Feast is a good book. An unusual story and an excellent plot taking you to the climax. Most of the main characters are clear as bells, in particular the monstrous Francesca, but also the humble but determined Bella. Lucy Foley also brings the place vividly to life: the manor in its two guises, crumbling in the past and vibrating in the present, as well as the beautiful Dorset scenery and the dying village.
I liked this and will remember especially the difficult-to-pin-down feeling of menace that Foley creates in both in the past and the present. Well worth reading and I give it 4-Stars.
Review by: Freyja
What’s in a Star?
For Oundle Crime, 4 Stars means “A good book with an interesting, layered story that you will still remember after a month.”
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