The Midnight Feast

January 1, 2024

Foley, a best-selling Reese's Book Club pick author, gets a 300K-copy first printing following The Paris Apartment. This time she offers a locked-room mystery set in The Manor, a luxury resort playing host to a range of characters with agendas--and hidden pasts. Prepub Alert.

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April 29, 2024
Foley’s scintillating latest (after The Paris Apartment) centers on the grand opening of a resort in the English village of Tome. Francesca Meadows, who summered in Tome as a child, has teamed with her celebrity architect husband, Owen Dacre, to build an ultra-chic retreat called the Manor. Their plans have angered some locals, who believe the Manor will encroach on sacred woodlands populated, according to folklore, by supernatural creatures known as the Birds. Despite protests, the Manor opens its doors for a summer solstice celebration. Attendees include Francesca’s twin brothers, Hugo and Oscar, and Bella Springfield, a mysterious woman who seems to know Francesca from her childhood visits to the village. In the run-up to the opening celebration’s marquee event, a bacchanalian midnight feast, the guests’ past connections and secret motives come to light. The next morning, a dead body is discovered on the resort’s grounds, and a question hangs in the air: is there a killer in the Manor’s midst, or have the Birds taken their revenge? While keeping track of the book’s five different narrators can be challenging, the chilling folk horror atmosphere and sucker-punch surprises more than compensate for any temporary confusion. Readers are in for a grisly treat. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, CAA.

May 15, 2024
From the author of The Paris Apartment (2022) and The Hunting Party (2019) comes a tantalizing riff on the classic locked-room mystery. A new, upscale resort known as the Manor is open for business. A handful of guests are soaking up the luxury. . . when a murder is committed. The circumstances are, to put it mildly, unusual, and it isn't long before the Manor's guests begin to feel that something isn't right--that something dark is coming into the light. The book (which is being adapted for television) isn't precisely a horror story, but it's very much horror-adjacent. It's definitely a bit of something new from Foley; in much the same way that she shifted gears from historical fiction to contemporary thrillers, Foley seems to have shifted gears again, adding in a supernatural element. True to her prowess as an author, the new angle works splendidly: this is a chilling, exciting, and hugely satisfying novel.

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