The Paris Apartment
Jess has always been on her own. Her mum took her own life when Jess was in middle school and she and her half-brother were placed in vastly different foster families. Charming Ben, who shared a mother with Jess, was placed into a wealthy family and given every privilege, eventually being adopted. Jess, meanwhile, was shunted from foster family to foster family until she eventually aged out of the system. Drifting between low-paying jobs, she rarely saw older brother Ben, Cambridge-educated and now a journalist living in Paris.
Finally, Jess decides to take Ben up on his “come and stay anytime” offer, with hardly any notice. Reluctantly, he agrees and Jess boards the Eurostar to take her under the channel. But when Jess shows up at the Paris apartment where Ben has been living, he doesn’t answer the buzzer. Or his phone. Texts are unanswered and Jess is left standing in the street, freezing with all of her belongings in her broken suitcase.
But Jess is nothing if not full of ingenuity. She discovers the gate code from another tenant and picks the lock on his third-floor apartment. Once inside she is blown away by the interior—luxurious and spacious and not in line with what she assumes to be the salary of someone who has been writing freelance restaurant reviews.
Where is Ben? During the first twenty-four hours, Jess questions other tenants of the building with little success. Is it just Parisians being rude or are they hiding something? From Antione on the first floor to Sophie in the penthouse, no one seems to have seen nor heard from Ben in some time, even though Jess had just spoken to him the night before. He told her he’d be waiting up to let her in.
As Jess digs deeper into Ben’s apartment, the luxe building, and its haughty inhabitants, she finds more questions than answers. With the help of a fellow journalist friend of Ben’s, Jess is drawn into a dark and frightening mystery—even too scary for a tough-as-nails girl from the foster system. The further she falls down the rabbit hole the more it becomes evident that something very sinister has happened to her brother.
Told from alternating points of view between Jess and the inhabitants of the swanky Paris apartment building, the pieces slowly come together into a horrifying picture. A twisted thriller meant to keep you guessing until the last page, The Paris Apartment delivers chills and revelations of what evil deeds great wealth can conceal.
∞ Author's Profile
Always in love with books and stories, Lucy Foley studied English at University College London and Durham University. She has worked in the publishing industry both in a literary agency and later as an editor for a publishing house. She has written six novels, of which the first three were historical fiction. She lives in London.
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