Lucy is fast becoming one of my favourite thriller authors so I had to request this one.

Costal setting. A party. An unsolved crime. Lots of locals and a disturbing folklore. A recipe for a very complex and interesting story.

The hotel has just reopened. It’s very expensive and brings a lot of posh people down from London. The locals don’t like it. The locals have secrets that they want to keep. What did happen to the old man in the woods? None of your business.

The owner is peace and serenity. Her husband is quiet and happy to be there. Or so it seems.

There’s a lone guest who has arrived. She’s at a couples retreat on her own. Fair enough. But she has questions. Lots of questions.

Who really are these people? What really happened all those years ago?

Told from multiple points of view and from both the past and the present, this will keep you guessing until the end.

This psychological drama is set around a new luxury retreat hotel in Dorset. Told in many points of view and flipping between timeliness, the tale is told. As the chapters are short, you don't get confused with who is speaking and the use of a diary works well to reveal the back story.
Add in a local legend, and we begin to see how no=one is quite what they seemed.
A real plausible page turner, meticulously plotted to create atmosphere and tension with a satisfying twist at the end.

Having enjoyed Lucy Foleys previous books I think this is her best one yet! The story starts off slowly but soon draws you in with plenty of intrigue, lots of twists with some creepy folklore thrown into the mix for good measure. No-one is who they might at first seem and there’s plenty of tongue-in-cheek references to influencer “gurus” which made me chuckle.. The plot was incredibly well thought out and everything comes together in the end in a brilliant way. This is definitely a top-class page-turner and a perfect summer read. Highly recommended.

Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

THE MIDNIGHT FEAST

Lucy Foley

"I refuse to be punished for something that happened so long ago."

-super short chapters and multiple POV made this one fast-paced and captivating
-it reminded me simultaneously of The Club (by Ellery Lloyd), Nine Perfect Strangers (by Liane Moriarty) and The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening (starring Moira Rose) ... 👀👀👀
-if you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise - I'll never think of Teddy Bears' Picnic the same way again!
-could have been more single-minded and definitely twistier, it got a little confusing and lost its punchiness by trying to do too much IMO
-regardless, Lucy Foley fans will adore this!

⭐⭐⭐

"I always did love sneaking out at midnight as a youth. There’s something so alive about this hour: magical and elemental. As though anything could happen."

"Because when you’ve behaved for this long, it feels so good to be a little bad."

Big thanks to Netgalley for an advanced digital copy

I enjoyed this book. I am a fan of Lucy Foley and this book did not disappoint. I enjoyed the different POVs and the connections between them. I liked the twists and turns of the well thought out plot and the ending was shocking but excellent!

The Midnight Feast is the third novel I’ve read by Lucy Foley and it was another enjoyable murder mystery thriller!

Set in a coastal countryside retreat named The Manor, the reader is introduced to a number of characters who are either guests or part of the running of the retreat. While the retreat feels luxurious, there is a darkness within the adjacent woods…

The multiple points of view narration works well to uncover each character’s personality and allows the reader to hear their thoughts and their motives. Foley uses the narrative to skilfully weave together the story and the group of characters by gradually revealing historic details and secrets. I felt the story had a slow start, but the suspense and eeriness maintained throughout the novel paired with the uniqueness of the story did grip my attention after the first quarter.

As the storyline approached its conclusion there were one too many coincidences for me when it came to the twists, but overall it’s a brilliant atmospheric mystery.

Many thanks to HarperCollins and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book to read and review.

The settings have played starring roles in this British thriller writer’s books – she’s taken us to Paris, the Scottish Highlands, an Irish island – and in her new book we are off to the cliffs on the Dorset coast for the opening weekend of a new country estate/wellness retreat called The Manor.
The owner is the mysterious and ethereal Francesca who gives off an air of Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop wellness brand as she floats through The Manor checking in with staff (she’s made sure to memorise all their names), no expense has been spared and everything must be perfect.
But this is a thriller, and a good one, so it starts with the discovery of an unidentified body at the bottom of the cliff and The Manor is on fire.
The story moves through three timelines, 15 years ago when Francesca was a teen, the lead-up to the much-anticipated alfresco midnight feast to mark The Manor’s opening and celebrate the solstice and the present with the police investigation.
Francesca has angered the nearby rural community, refusing to hire locals who don’t fit in with her Instagram-perfect look for The Manor, cutting off their access to the centuries-old woods and co-opting some of their folklore for her “pagan chic” feast.
It’s all deliciously creepy and intriguing as we get to the bottom of the death and the fire.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley

This was incredible - I’ve been recommending it to everyone. A 5/5 read for sure!

Lucy Foley has created such a perfect atmospheric thriller, I loved the midsommer-esque setting, the characters were extremely well developed and there were twists after twists to keep me engaged.

I can definitely see this being in my top 5 books of 2024!

A new hotel/wellness retreat is being opened in what used to be the Manor. Francesca Meadows returns to her grandparents home as the owner and almost priestess like hostess for the opening at the Solstice weekend but other people from her past are returning as well. This was a really fun read, well constructed (multiple narrators, jumps in timeline, also teenage journal entries) to tell a complicated story but it worked for me. Francesca’s persona reminded me of Nicole Kidmans character in Nine Perfect Strangers, the same fakeness. The local legends of the Birds was a great inclusion, I particularly liked the final sentence!

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley

I started this book in bed at night, which turned out to be a big mistake because I didn’t want to go to sleep once I’d started. We’re introduced to the village of Tome (pronounced ‘tomb’ by the locals just to add a sense of foreboding) and the new wellness retreat created there by Francesca Woodland who inherited The Manor and it’s land from her grandfather. Her husband Owen is the architect on the project and has created woodland ‘hutches’ for guests, featuring outdoor showers and luxurious linens. The Manor itself is the central hub where there are classes in meditation and yoga, with a spa that has reiki alongside all the usual treatments. The opening weekend looms and while there’s a hint of anxiety around the building of the tree houses, Fran is sure she has everything under control. On the final night of the stay she has planned a mini-festival with live music, a meal out in the woods and strange wooden sculptures. Every guest must wear a crown fashioned from twigs creating the look and feel of a pagan celebration. While the music is at it’s loudest she has given Owen the go ahead to start digging the foundations for the tree houses, in the hope the music drowns out the noise. However, that’s not the only problem on the horizon. In order to build the houses, they must take down some of the ancient trees and when Owen arrives the workmen are confused by the new symbols on the trees. They look like seagulls in flight. By the morning there’s a burned effigy and a body on the beach, a wrecked Aston Martin with blood inside and the manor hiss been rased to the ground by a ferocious fire. It looks like the midnight feast was a rather Bacchanalian event, with discarded drink bottles, feathers and clothes littering the ground, but something went badly awry. Everyone in Tome knows the local saying- ‘Don’t disturb the birds’. Could Francesca’s dream be over when it had only just begun?

The book starts with the aftermath, but there are two more timelines: twenty years ago when Francesca was a teenager living at the manor with her grandparents and twin brothers, then the beginning of the weekend leading up to the feast. This multi-layered effect is multiplied with several narrators - Bella who is befriended by a young Francesca and later is a mystery guest at The Manor’s opening weekend; Owen who is Francesca’s husband but also hides a secret past; a young man called Eddie who is the retreat’s kitchen help and Francesca, the founder. It seemed like a lot of perspectives and timelines at first but the author is very skilled at creating distinctive characters so I soon got to know them and I didn’t feel lost. Francesca radiates a sense of calm and purity. However, like many people who put up a facade like this, it’s only so long before they blow and I was waiting for that moment. Bella is very secretive, realising she isn’t The Manor’s target demographic she’s worried she might stand out. Owen is very successful architect, wealthy and absolutely in love with Francesca, but seems to know a lot about local folklore and knows his way to a secret beach. Eddie, who I was rather fond of, lives in the shadow of his older brother who went missing years ago after becoming an addict. He lives at home with his parents on the family farm and feels his father’s despair that the son who loved working the farm is gone. Eddie wants something different, but given his parent’s disapproval of the retreat, he hides his job there and is hoping to work up the organisation. Finally there’s the DI on the case, who is trying to piece together the night before and recovering a body from the beach, while the only witness to the death is an elderly man who keeps going on about giant birds, as big as a human.

There’s a sinister ‘them and us’ feel to this novel, a distinction that’s in one way about class and in another way about belonging. Locals are different from tourists, but even though Francesca is local she comes from the big house, and can’t be one of them. Bella’s mother scolds her for spending her summer up at the manor and wishes she would make more friends from the village. Those at the big house don’t understand the village ways. When Bella bumps into a good-looking surfer down on the secret beach there’s an instant attraction, but when she takes him to the manor Francesca and her brothers tease him as if he’s a yokel. Bella starts to wonder where she fits in at all. There are those who have transcended where they came from, but the transformation was painful and has left it’s scars. I could sense a lot of references, such as The Wicker Man and Midsommer where a seemingly pastoral and innocent celebration slowly builds towards violence. The note left for Francesca, the marked trees and the chicken nailed to her door could have been someone disgruntled with the retreat, but it felt more personal. Francesca struck me as a powder keg. When younger, she appears to have very little empathy, especially for those she views as beneath her. Her brothers have a similar outlook, convinced they can do whatever they like to the locals and it will be swept up by the family as if it never happened. Francesca was like a cat playing with a mouse and the pleasure she got from hurting others gave the impression of a psychopath in the making. Then at the opening weekend, the local kids make their protest felt by pelting the pool with stones and building fires on the section of the beach reserved for guests only. They have bigger plans too, but they’re saving them all for the night of the Midnight Feast.

Bella wants her revenge to be more permanent than a simple disturbance and she’s determined. With bleached, short hair she’s not easily recognisable as the girl she was and manages to be under the radar. When she first sees Eddie she’s taken aback, he looks so much like someone she used to know. Is she seeing ghosts everywhere? She is psychologically haunted by what happened all those years ago at another midnight feast and she’s appalled by Francesca’s decision to name the event after their final night as friends. Bella wants to make sure that the perfect, pious Sunday supplement Francesca is shown up for who she really is. By this time I was desperate for her to get her comeuppance to as we slowly see the consequences of that night long ago spreading into several local families. Each one has their own grudge: a father who’s been drinking ever since; a baby growing up without it’s mum; a young man with an addiction so strong he’s willing to lie and steal. Yet Francesca and her twin brothers are still rich, successful and as insufferable as ever. So it isn’t just our narrators who have reason to hate The Manor and some of them exact their revenge in amusing ways, while others want to end the retreat and Francesca for good. I loved the folk ritual element, reminiscent of Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home mixed with a dose of Hitchcock’s killer birds. They are the size of a human, covered in black feathers and under their cloak is the huge beak. The villagers take them seriously, even the contractors who turn up to remove the trees don’t want to mess with those marked by the birds, they’d rather give the money back. Are the birds a simple folk tale that keeps Tome safe or are they real? Tome’s forest and it’s beaches are for the villagers and not to be fenced off for the use of rich visitors. As we countdown to what happened on the big night, two parties twenty years apart reveal their secrets and the birds will have their final say. The ending is terrifyingly final for some, while others will wake up hungover and wondering what exactly they witnessed. As for me, the final page reveal really made me smile.

I’ve enjoyed Lucy Foley’s past work so I was really eager to read this. I loved the scene setting which immerses the reader into the manor retreat which blurs between luxurious and spooky. The twists were great and unexpected. I found it a bit confusing to remember who was who and it’s strange that the characters who knew each other so well as teenagers didn’t recognise each other at all as adults - despite being back in the same place for similar reasons.

I was a huge fan of the Guest List and The Paris Apartment, so was expecting a other great thriller this time.

I must admit that this one, for me, didn't quite live up to the standards of those earlier thrillers. I appreciated the theme with a bit of a supernatural feel to it with the spooky woods and the mythical Crows.

The scene setting was very good and I felt that I was on the Guest List and part of the action at the coastal manor where this thriller was set.

However, the characters were a bit lacking for me. You never really got to grips with any of the characters and to have so many of them that were closely linked in childhood to not recognise each other in adult life just seems a little far-fetched on reflection.

It was a good book with lots of different plot lines going on but a few too many characters and not really enough 'thrill' for me.

3.5 stars but rounded up to 4.

The Midnight Feast follows several characters who are all at The Manor, an idyllic retreat with a bit of intrigue for those with the money to partake in it.

I have read several of Foley's books and this one follows a similar plotline to previous published works. These are books which I enjoy as they're quick to read, mostly easy to follow and allow the reader to guess throughout. They are a very reader friendly thriller/mystery book for both beginners and advanced levels.

The Midnight Feast in particular was enjoyable because of the supernatural and spooky aspect that sat alongside it. I very much enjoyed the village of Tome and the mystery surrounding it. I liked that as the book progressed, you found out more and I didn't see the plot twist coming even though it was there in front of me the whole time. That is exactly what I want in a thriller.

The writing style is good. Some of the language seemed a bit odd but I appreciate Foley was going for a specific style and a specific narrative. This did not impact my opinion on the book and I quickly got into the flow of the writing.

It is a thriller/mystery which I'd recommend to others as it's an easy read and enjoyable at the same time.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, Harper Collins, for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Lucy Foley is back at her best. I devoured this.

A whodunnit that is up there with The Hunting Party, I absolutely loved it. The characters were a good mix of innocent and unhinged. The backstory and the present story were very easy to keep apart. There was more than one gasp out loud moment from me.

I don't want to spoil it but just read it. Its so good!!!!!

The Manor has been recently renovated and is reopening as a wellness retreat for anyone who can pay for it. Which is decidedly not the locals. No expense has been spared and London's richest have come to bask in the coastal glow for opening weekend.But with strain between the owner and the locals, secrets start to slip out, the manor catches fire, and a body is found.

No one, and I mean no one, can form an unexpected connection like Lucy Foley. After reading her other books I’ve come to expect that I’ll have no idea what is going on, but she will explain everything to me when the time is right. The way that she seamlessly threads together the seemingly unconnected into a tangled web of secrets and lies is unmatched in every way.

If you’re looking for a mystery with so many twists and turns it’s hard to keep count, this book is for you.

Thank you Netgalley, HarperCollins UK, and Lucy Foley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

I loved this, it was well paced and kept me engaged throughout, some parts were slightly predictable but it didn't take any enjoyment away! another classic Foley!

Not great. This was very confusing and not in a "I want to figure out wtf is happening" kind of way, but in a "this makes NO SENSE to me" way.

I'm not a thriller expert. I casually pick them up and I don't have strong feelings about what they should or shouldn't be. The only thing I expect is to be thrilled. Even if I have to suspend disbelief or just go along for the ride, I want to feel the tension ebb and flow throughout the story, to lean forward in my seat, to want to connect the dots. None of that happened for me with this one.

I liked some elements of it, like the incorporation of folklore into the story, which was interesting and unexpected, the dual timeline, and the short chapters, but not much else. Maybe this just wasn't the Lucy Foley book for me and another of her books will work better, but this was a flop.

About the audiobook: the narration was fine. A solid audiobook that delivers the story quite well.

The Midnight Feast is very on brand for Lucy Foley, lots of characters (almost all) who are not what they seem and twisting, turning plots. We follow the opening weekend of an exclusive retreat hotel that predictably starts off perfectly and slowly unravels as the characters reveal their true agendas. I found it slightly confusing to establish who was who between the past and the present, but overall it's a good engrossing read: perfect for summer reading, especially as it is set around the solstice. The ending is also well thought out and satisfying for the reader who has been invested in these characters.

I have read Foley’s previous works and so expected this non-linear style of narrative from the offset and could not wait to dive into ‘The Midnight Feast’.
It reads like a locked room mystery set in a glamorous and exclusive hotel called The Manor, but as with all of Foley’s works- not everyone is as they seem. It definitely felt eerie with references to past secrets and hazy summer evenings, which pulled me in from just the synopsis. Although I enjoyed the dark and midsomer vibe to this novel so I think it will be a perfect summer read but personally the pacing slacked a little in the middle, but because I know how talented Foley is with her twists and turns I had to keep going.
Lucy Foley is quickly becoming one of my go to writers for thrillers and contemporary whodunnits so I have no doubt that she has plenty more up her sleeve. Brilliantly sharp and wicked in all the best ways.

"The Midnight Feast" is another wonderful thriller from Lucy Foley. The narrative focuses on a few of the characters who are key to events which take place on the summer solstice of 2025. Chapters vary between the action before the solstice and those afterwards. We gradually learn what happened, why and how, with a number of plot twists along the way. I thought that the shadows of witchcraft and the Wicker Man would put me off, but this was not the case. Chapters are very short (think Dan Brown) which encourages the reader to carry on, although that unfortunately means getting to the end quicker! An engrossing read with some great characters.

Thanks to Net Galley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.