It's Quicker and Easier to Eat Your Young in THE MIDNIGHT FEAST (2024)

"Keeping people away from the land—from their land—like this, it's evil. It's a kind of murder."

The distinction between a murder mystery and a psychological thriller is a matter of some debate—certainly there are many psychological thrillers featuring a murder, and many tense mystery novels rooted in the psyche. But I'd like to propose a metric that I'll call the Copacabana Rule, after the melodramatic climax of the Barry Manilow song: "There was blood and a single gun shot— But just who shot who?" That is to say that if, rather than elements like motive, means, or murder weapons, the central mystery is suspense over which character is going to get axed (or indeed, if there was any murder at all), then you are firmly in psychological thriller territory.

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley passes the Copacabana test. There are four-ish corpses, and in my eBook, which displayed as having 492 pages, the first victim is identified on page 368, 75% of the way through the novel. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy it (I zipped through the book in a day), just that if you're expecting a fair-play mystery, this novel does not play fair.

Socialite sociopath Francesca Meadows has returned to her family manor in a small Dorset town to convert it into a New Age-y luxury retreat for the ultra-wealthy. This has sparked anger among the locals, both because the Manor's property cuts off access to public land (there's a right to roam in the UK, at least in theory), and because Francesca doesn't hire locals—their rural accents would just ruin the #cottagecore vibe, you see:

"And you know I don't want to make it about class. I really don't. But you just can't with some people."

Yeah, class shouldn't matter, in 2025. But it does. Maybe more than ever.

Between the powder keg of class antagonism and the suffocating global warming-induced heat, you can smell the smoke before the first mention of fire. Foley's distinctive narration style is off-kilter and claustrophobic, pinballing between timelines and first-person perspectives as you attempt to piece the story together. The main narrators are Francesca, her architect husband Owen with his hidden past, "Bella", a guest hiding a vendetta against Francesca, Eddie, a local boy and dishwasher, and D.I. Marshall, the police detective investigating the murder of one of the other narrators (but just who killed who?).

Of course, the obvious candidate is Francesca. Francesca could be an Agatha Christie character, for sure, if you put one of Christie's waspish villains on an IV-drip of vitamins and Instagram. She's Merricat Blackwood by way of Ali from Hey Ladies. Every one of her diary entries is just the word "Blessed". As Midnight Feast goes on, your question is less "who's going to kill her" than "is she going to be the victim, or the murderer?"

Sticky title, by the way. A midnight feast is pretty much what it sounds like: an event held in secret where you dine in the middle of the night. In the modern day it has a childish, sleepover-like association, but as the title of a mystery book, it takes on a more macabre tone. With all the crow imagery, I couldn't help envisioning carrion birds, and apparently Owen has the same association:

Just in front of me on the path are two huge crows, squabbling over the entrails of some small creature, dancing and bickering as they tear into the flesh. […] I take a step closer and wait for them to fly away but they're too focused on their feast.

By the end of the book "midnight feast" takes on several other sinister associations. This builds to a climax in the Manor's solstice Bacchanal, which, as one of the hotel's few black employees puts it, is "definitely giving Midsommar".

I didn't find most of the climactic twists all that surprising, except for the identity of one character which, when revealed, was absolutely gutting. There are plenty of great creepy setpieces on he way, though: the medieval cult of bird people, the couple stalking each other, the tree covered in eyes, the woods full of blood, the Manor's stupid rain showers. I'd just say that The Midnight Feast is more The Menu than The Hollow.