A few months ago, I read Paris's BEHIND CLOSED DOORS which I thought was a very disturbing and intense novel about a couple who seemed to have the perfect marriage but whose life was really not as it seemed. Based on this, I was looking forward to reading another thriller from Paris and was glad when I found THE GUEST in a Little Free Library. However, I was somewhat mixed on this one. It starts out with a teaser prologue to what happens later in the novel where an explosion causes some sort of grief for the characters in the story. Then it shifts to the two main protagonists, Iris and Gabriel, who return home from a holiday to find an uninvited guest in their house. This guest is Laure, one of their close friends who they met 20 years earlier at a resort along with her husband, Pierre. Turns out Laure has walked out on her husband because he has confessed to having a secret child. So how long is Laure staying? Well she keeps extending her stay and soon becomes tiresome. So what really happened between her and Pierre? Gabriel keeps trying to contact him but Pierre is reluctant to talk to him. And then there is a gardener named Joseph with a checkered past who is also keeping secrets from the couple and who may be involved with Laure. Along the way some unexpected deaths occur...are they murders? And finally, a big unexpected twist is revealed at the end which I was not really expecting.
As I said, I was kind of mixed on this one. The story seemed to ramble on for the first half of the book without much happening. As it moved into the second half, some very unexpected things occur but to me the story didn't really grab me like Behind Closed Doors did. There was the very unexpected twist at the end but even that to me seemed a bit anticlimactic. Just a mild recommendation for this one.
As I said, I was kind of mixed on this one. The story seemed to ramble on for the first half of the book without much happening. As it moved into the second half, some very unexpected things occur but to me the story didn't really grab me like Behind Closed Doors did. There was the very unexpected twist at the end but even that to me seemed a bit anticlimactic. Just a mild recommendation for this one.
