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. There was a lot of yawning the next day. 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 late 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 their bark. 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. There’s also an elderly fisherman rambling on about seeing giant birds. 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 of the festivities, but there are two more timelines: fifteen-twenty years ago when Francesca was a teenager living at the manor with her grandparents and twin brothers and the beginning of the weekend leading up to the feast twenty-four hours later. This multi-layered effect is multiplied with several narrators – Bella who is befriended by a young Francesca and later becomes 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 while 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 the elderly man who still blaming giant birds.
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 and even though Francesca is local because she comes from the big house she 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. They want to make clear that Tome’s forest and it’s beaches are for the villagers and not to be fenced off for the use of rich visitors.
Bella wants her revenge to be more permanent than a simple one-off 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? 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, I devoured this book overnight and the final page reveal really made me smile.
Out now from Harper Collins
Meet the Author
Lucy is the No.1 New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Hunting Party, The Guest List and most recently The Midnight Feast. It’s set at a luxury new countryside resort built on old secrets beside an ancient wood. The opening weekend takes place during a heatwave (and with a big summer solstice celebration) and temperatures and tensions are rising, the local community is incensed by the influx of wealthy newcomers and some unexpected guests have come to stay. Then a body is found…
Lucy always knew wanted to work with books somehow, so studied English at university before working in a bookshop, a literary agency and then as a fiction editor at a big publishing house, during which time she realised that every book starts off as a messy first draft full of plot holes and mistakes. She thought she’d have a go at writing herself — the result of which was her first historical fiction novel, The Book of Lost and Found. She wrote two more historicals, The Invitation and Last Letter to Istanbul, before turning to the dark side and writing her first crime thriller, The Hunting Party: her first Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Month, set over New Year’s Eve at a remote, snowy spot in the Scottish Highlands.
Next came The Guest List, a murder mystery set at a wedding on an island off the coast of Ireland, which was a Reese’s Book Club pick, a Goodreads Choice Awards winner, a Waterstones Book of the Month, and has sold over three million copies. Then came The Paris Apartment, which is a number one New York Times bestseller and Sunday Times bestseller. Her books have been translated into over 40 languages and all three murder mysteries are currently being adapted for TV and film.
She’s also written a short story for the brand new Marple collection, a brand new series of short stories featuring Agatha Christie’s legendary detective Jane Marple, alongside writers such as Val McDermid, Kate Mosse, Alyssa Cole, Ruth Ware and Leigh Bardugo, out September 2022 to coincide with Christie’s birthday!
If you enjoy her books or want to say hi, she’d love to hear from you: She’s @lucyfoleytweets on Twitter and @lucyfoleyauthor on Instagram, or you can check out her Facebook author page @lucyfoleyauthor
The Lotus Readers 