The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley Full Book Summary
From the author of The Guest List, Lucy Foley, comes her next thriller about Jess who’s convinced her half-brother Ben has disappeared and Ben’s neighbors have something to do with it if only she could prove it. Check out the summary below to remind yourself of the main points of the book before you read my book review. If you haven’t read the entire book yet, you’ll miss the finer details that make for a convincing thriller.
Prologue
Ben Daniels is waiting for his half-sister, Jess Hadley, to show up when he sees someone running out his window. He’s in the middle of leaving Jess a voice note with directions to his Paris apartment building when he stops to listen. Then, he hears someone outside his door, unlocking it.
Three Hours Later: Chapters 1-5
Jess arrives at Ben’s building after midnight, but nobody answers the door or buzzer. Sophie Meunier is in her apartment when she hears the knocker, but she ignores it and is reminiscing how everything was ruined once Ben moved in. As Jess is thinking about how she no longer has a job, a man walks up to the gate, but won’t let her in when she mentions Ben’s name.
Once he leaves, she uses the key code she saw him use to open the gate. An older woman watches all of this happen from her small cottage in the courtyard.
Chapter 6-9
On the fourth floor, Mimi hears through her open window someone say Ben’s name and then sees a girl come through the gate as she just notices her roommate Camille is in the apartment. When Jess finally makes it to Ben’s 3rd floor apartment, no answers her knocking, so she picks the lock but then a cat jumps on her when she enters the very nice apartment. After taking some of his cigarettes and money from his wallet, Jess can’t find him anywhere even though Ben’s keys and wallet are here, but then she notices there’s blood on the cat’s paws.
Chapters 10-12
Jess convinces herself the cat must have killed a small animal and goes to bed in Ben’s bed where she finds a pair of women’s underwear. When an arguing couple in the courtyard wakes her up, Jess heads down to help the young woman who tells her she’s leaving her husband, Antoine, the man Jess met outside the gate, and admits to at least flirting with Ben. Nick watches all of this from the second floor, noting it’s probably the half sister his old university friend told him about.
Chapters 13-15
Back in the apartment, Jess smells bleach by the front door and finds the chain Ben always wear on the floor. After seeing Mimi on her balcony, Jess goes to her apartment where Mimi admits she passed Ben on the stairs yesterday. Jess tries to ask more, but Jess closes the door on her, and then Mimi feels panicked and throws up inside her apartment.
Chapters 16-18
Sophie finds Jess outside her apartment door, but quickly dismisses her that she hasn’t seen Ben even though it’s clear Sophie doesn’t like him. Then, Sophie thinks about the most recent blackmail letter asking for more money to keep her secrets, and she goes up to the old servants quarters above the penthouse floor that only she has keys to. Back in Ben’s apartment, Jess doesn’t want to involve the police until she’s more sure about Ben because of her own background, and she finds a hidden door in the wall when she thinks she hears someone walking down stairs.
Chapters 19-21
After opening the door and noticing a spy hole into each apartment, she follows the footsteps down into the basement through the hidden staircase, but there’s no there when she turns on the light. In the basement, she notices Ben’s Vespa with the front tire destroyed, and then the door closes on her when she goes into an extensive wine cellar. As she’s screaming for help, Ben’s friend Nick hears her and opens the door saying it must have gotten jammed.
Sophie goes to the concierge and tells her to report everything the concierge sees Jess doing.
Chapters 22-24
After finding Jess in the basement, Nick invites her back to his apartment, but says he hasn’t seen Ben in the last few days and it’s very like him to up and leave for a few days. Jess learns they went to Cambridge together, and Nick is the one who got Ben this apartment. On her way out, Jess runs into the elderly woman, the concierge, who tells her that there’s nothing for her here.
Chapters 25-26
After finding a business card that Ben wrote on to contact in his wallet, Jess texts the number asking about Ben, and plans a meeting at a cafe with the man. At the cafe, Jess meets Theo Mendelson who’s a newspaper editor that Ben wrote pieces for, and had planned to meet that morning with an investigation piece but never showed up.
After telling Theo everything that happened, Jess asks Theo about a mysterious metal card with a firework symbol from Ben’s wallet, and Theo takes it to figure it out promising to give it back. Then, Theo uses noise cancelling headphones to listen to the voice note Ben left Jess. Now, after Ben cuts off the directions, they hear the door open, Ben ask someone what they’re doing here, and then a groan.
Chapters 27-29
Mimi’s thinking about the time Ben sent her a note and a record in the dumb waiter that goes through all their apartments, and when she pulls it to her apartment to find a bloody knife inside. On her walk home, Jess finally calls the police about her brother’s situation, but they keep suggesting Ben left for a few days and aren’t much help. Then she realizes someone is following her, and it turns out to be a young Eastern European woman looking for Ben who gets scared and runs off when Jess says he’s disappeared.
Back in the apartment, Jess finds a hidden notebook of Ben’s notes that says the names of Sophie, Mimi, and the concierge under the title the little death. Then, Jess wakes in the middle of the night to hear footsteps in the apartment that leave a minute later, and, when she gets up to turn the lights on, the notebook is gone.
Thirty hours earlier
Chapter 30
Ben is suddenly attacked by someone, Nick he thinks, but notes that everyone is connected and could be involved. As he’s laying on the floor bleeding, he thinks Jess will be in danger when she gets here, too.
Chapters 31-32
Flash forward again, Nick runs into Jess outside the apartment, and after she admits to him all that’s happened, he agrees to take her to the police station and speak with them in French so they understand better. She convinces him not to give her name because she recently took money from the register at work when she permanently left to come here because her boss flashed her at work. Nick tells the detective everything, and they play him the voice note which gets him to agree to look into it.
Chapters 33-35
As she’s preparing to have the neighbors over for their usual monthly wine night, Sophie thinks about the first time Ben came, and she found him snooping in her husband’s office. Hearing noise upstairs, Jess goes outside Sophie’s door where she’s discovered by the dog but surprisingly invited in by Sophie. Once inside, Mimi and Antoine are also there when Jess tells them she went to the police.
Chapters 36-39
Mimi spills her glass of wine when Jess mentions the police, and has to excuse herself to throw up in the bathroom. Then, Nick arrives and brings Jess up to the rooftop terrace to see the city skyline where they talk about a backpacking trip he took with Ben around Europe. Nick thinks back to sharing all his secrets with Ben there, but quickly changes the subject when Jess asks why he hadn’t seen Ben since then.
Chapters 40-42
When she’s supposed to be finding the bathroom, Jess snoops around in an office to find an old Russian passport belonging to Sophie, and a family photo that includes Sophie and her husband, Jacques Meunier, with three kids who Jess realizes is Nick, Antoine, and Mimi. Sophie thinks back to not liking Ben right away because he could tell she wasn’t originally from France, but Jacques kept him around so Ben would be a good influence on her stepsons. Back in Ben’s apartment, Jess finds a hidden paper that looks the same as the one on Jacques desk, but with the symbol she saw on the metal card in Ben’s wallet.
Chapters 43-45
As Mimi and Camille are getting ready for the Halloween party they’re hosting in the basement, Jess catches the concierge trying to open her apartment door before running away. As she’s leaving, the concierge thinks about the time she told Ben that she came to Paris with her daughter who was a dancer even though the daughter is no longer in Paris. After seeing the partygoers arrive, Jess dresses up as ghost by putting a sheet over her head, and heads down to the party to see if anyone knows Ben.
Chapters 46-48
In his apartment, Nick thinks about how his father Jacques seemed to like Ben better than his own sons, especially after Nick lost all the money his dad gave him on a failed health startup in Palo Alto. At the party, Camille seems weird and then runs off when Jess tries to ask about the night Ben disappeared. Being at the party reminds Mimi of the time she ran into Ben at a bar and ended up telling him all about the pressure her that her puts on her, and even kissed him once when she realized by the end of the night she was in love with Ben.
Chapters 49-50
After taking a drink from a guy, Jess convinces him to get them into Mimi and Camille’s apartment where Jess finds paintings Mimi did of Ben but the eyes have all been cut out. Jess also finds one of Ben’s t-shirts before something in Jess’s drink makes her pass out. The next morning as she takes her bike out of the cave, she sees Ben’s Vespa and thinks about how she slashed the front tire so he couldn’t get around the city as fast.
Now that she could follow him on foot, Mimi followed him to a cafe where he met a beautiful woman he didn’t seem to know. After Ben gave her a phone or camera, he left. Back in present day, Mimi purposely rides her bike into traffic and gets hit by van, but only has a few scratches.
Chapters 51-52
Sophie thinks back to the time when she confronted Ben about the threatening notes she was getting, but finally believed him that he didn’t know anything about those. They started drinking wine, and ended up sleeping together. Nick thinks back to the night in Amsterdam that he kissed Ben after telling him all the awful things his dad had done to him, and realized he was attracted to Ben. But after Ben moved here, Nick was jealous his father liked Ben better, and Ben never seemed to have time for him.
Chapters 53-55
When Jess wakes up the next afternoon, she vaguely remembers the guy just helping her get back to her apartment before leaving, and then she gets a call from Theo saying he figured out the metal card in Ben’s wallet. When Antoine comes to Nick’s apartment, Antoine is mad about Jess being there and worried about her going to the police, but Nick says he’s taken care of it. Nick also thinks back to two weeks ago when Antoine came to him to say that his wife was cheating on him with Ben because he heard her ringtone upstairs when she was supposedly gone.
Seventy two hours earlier
The concierge watches as a dead body in a makeshift shroud is carried into the courtyard.
Chapters 57-60
The concierge stops Jess in the courtyard and warns her to leave because she can’t help Ben now anyways. When Mimi comes to see her mom, Sophie thinks about how she got Mimi as a baby with a fake birth certificate when Mimi’s biological mother died as an undocumented immigrant. When Jess meets up with Theo, they go to a hidden, exclusive club where everyone wears masks and they show the metal card from Ben’s wallet to get in.
Inside the dim club, Theo tells her this club is owned by Jacques, and it’s called the little death like in Ben’s notebook. Then the show starts with a series of barely dressed dancers on the stage, and Jess suddenly recognizes one of them.
Chapters 61-63
One of the dancers is the Eastern European woman that was following Jess the other day, and on stage she seems to recognize Jess in the crowd. At the apartment, Sophie is meeting with Antoine, Nick, and Mimi who all know Jess showed up at the club, and they get into a fight about what to do about her. Outside the club, the dancer catches up to Theo and Jess.
Chapters 64-65
As the concierge hears them talking in Sophie’s apartment, she thinks about how she told Ben that she came to Paris when her daughter called to say she was in trouble because she was pregnant and could not work. By the time the concierge got to the city, she found out her daughter died in childbirth, but she took this job to be close to her granddaughter. Back in her apartment, Mimi snaps at Camille that she’s too messy and brings too many people back to the apartment at night, and Camille admits she’s leaving to live with Antoine’s ex-wife who she’s been having an affair with all this time.
Mimi also thinks back to two weeks ago when she used the concierge key to get into Ben’s apartment and wait for him to come back. While she was waiting, she found a document on his computer about her dad’s company that she reads.
Chapters 66-68
Once they’re far from the secret club, the dancer, Irina, tells Jess and Theo that the club dancers are actually sex workers that the wine company is a front for, and Jacques keeps their passports so they can’t leave. Irina tells them that there’s a rumor that his wife came from the club, and that she told all this to Ben who said he’d help her and had her take photos with a camera of a client who’s a cop. Mimi thinks about how she read about what the club really was and who her real mother when she heard Ben coming back, and Mimi hid in the closet when Ben came back in with Sophie.
Chapters 69-71
After leaving Irina, Theo and Jess hook up in a bar bathroom, but when they go to the metro stop the police stop Theo. The police plant drugs on Theo while Jess jumps onto the train before they grab her, and Jess notices that one of the police is the detective that Nick talked to about Ben who she suddenly puts together was also at the club. After Nick and Mimi leave, Antoine stays behind and tells Sophie that he’s the one that’s been leaving her the blackmail.
Chapters 72-74
When Antoine tells Sophie he’s going to tell Jacques about her affair with Ben, Sophie calls his bluff because she knows he doesn’t want to be cut off by his dad. Sophie thinks about how she mistakenly admitted to Ben she was from the club, and Mimi wasn’t her biological daughter. When Jess makes it the apartment, she finds the concierge unconscious at the bottom of the stairs in a pile of clothes, but Jess doesn’t have a phone on her and the gate is locked.
Chapters 75-76
Nick thinks how Mimi came to him distraught after finding out the truth, and how he felt the same when he found out. He comes out saying he doesn’t know anything about the concierge falling, but Antoine walks out of his apartment before Jess runs up into her apartment. Nick opens her apartment with a key as the cat jumps onto him, giving Jess the opportunity to grab a knife and push Antoine down the stairs on her way out.
Chapters 77-79
Mimi holds onto her mom as they hear a commotion outside. To get away, Jess runs all the way up and picks the lock to get into the old maid’s quarter above the penthouse where she sees something on an old mattress. Hearing Jess scream about Ben being dead, memories resurface to Mimi of her being in Ben’s apartment covered in blood with her canvas cutting knife, and then her mom being there to wash her off.
Chapters 80-81
Sophie remembers finding Mimi at the same time the concierge does, and together they get Mimi and the apartment cleaned up of blood. When Nick and Antoine walk in, Sophie tells them it was Jacques who killed him after finding out what he was writing about from Nick. In the attic, Ben opens his eyes as Jess takes his hand, and then, Nick and Sophie show up.
Chapters 82-85
Nicks in shock because he saw the wrapped up body and blood, and even carried it down and buried it with Antoine in the courtyard. Suddenly, Mimi remembers seeing her dad enter Ben’s apartment through her window and start beating him with a wine bottle when she rushed over and stabbed her dad with the canvas knife to save Ben. Sophie and the concierge brought Ben up to the attic before the boys showed up, and wrapped Jacques body so they couldn’t see who it was.
Chapters 86-90
Jess tries to convince Sophie to let them go, and they’ll never tell anyone what Mimi did. Sophie doesn’t know what else to do except believe her. Nicks in so much shock he can’t speak.
Two Weeks Later
Jess takes Ben to the hospital under the pretense he fell off his Vespa and remained unconscious at his apartment due to the concussion until she showed up. Ben apologizes for getting involved with this family after Nick told him the stories in Amsterdam and thinking this would help his career. Sophie gets a letter that in two weeks Ben’s article about her husbands club will be published, but her and Mimi won’t be mentioned if she helps all the trafficked girls from the club get out of there.
Because she only wants to protect Mimi who she sent to the south of France to recover, Sophie agrees. The concierge has gone missing from the building along with Sophie’s dog and a small Matisse painting, and Nick has left to live on his own. Later, the papers publish that Jacques has disappeared because of the allegations in Ben’s article, and Antoine shot himself before he could be questioned.
Jess also uses some money from Sophie to get on a train and start a new life in Rome. On the train platform, she thinks she sees the concierge getting on a different train to the south of France.
Read the Full Book Review of The Paris Apartment
Now that you’re reminded of everything that happened in the book, check out my full book review. I also have other book recommendations if you like these types of books. You can also check out the summary and review for The Guest List if you like this author and writing style.
