The Midnight Feast, the newest thriller from Lucy Foley, takes place at the opening weekend of a luxe resort. Francesca Meadows has inherited her family’s manor house and turned it into a Goop-esque retreat for the ultra-rich. It’s booked solid for opening weekend, even if that falls on solstice in the woods, full of pagan legends.

From the beginning, there’s already the sense that something is just off here. Francesca and her carefully-designed elite retreat are just too perfect. There are working-class tensions just below the surface, as the local manor house becomes a completely unaffordable luxury hotel. A few locals find jobs, usually in cleaning or other invisible roles, but most resent the resort and the use of their community woods for upscale, faux-local glamping.

There are three different timelines woven together in The Midnight Feast. The main one is opening weekend, then there’s a flash-forward sort of storyline investing the tragic death just outside the hotel. I wasn’t expecting to like this one, perhaps because I read a lot of thrillers and the flash-forward to the post-tragedy police visit is a pretty common opening scene. The third is a teenage diary, recounting a summer of midnight feasts with her new friend, the rich girl, Frankie, in the manor house, and slowly exposing all the shady parts of the rich family, the local legends of the vengeful Birds and pagan justice, teen romance and friendship, and more secrets. You guys, the secrets in this one! So many layers.

If my own diary were ever used as evidence or backstory, there wouldn’t be a lot of clearly related narrative with key clues, it would be more lists of petty annoyances or dream future trips, but I can overlook that. The young diarist in The Midnight Feast really does have a teenage voice and that makes the diary timeline easier to accept, and the diary entries work to bring the two time periods together. Besides, Foley has given us enough signposts by the time the diary starts that readers will be guessing who each teenager is in their adult incarnation. (I got Shrimp right immediately, but completely missed Shelly.)

There’s an Agatha Christie vibe in a lot of Lucy Foley books,  where certain employees are overlooked simply because they’re employees, like how domestic servants or nurses can be overlooked as potential suspects in Christie mysteries until the dramatic reveal that a paid worker has private motivations, too! They have emotions and goals, just like rich people do!

So, I was pretty caught up in the thriller part,  of course. One guest is not a wealth vacationer, but a visitor for an entirely different reason, traveling under a false name and cover story.  There are also intriguing run-ins, where characters turn up in different places or places where they probably shouldn’t be. Foley can tell these suspenseful stories, with just enough clues and coincidences to create more and more questions. I was so happy that this was a total pageturner, because I absolutely loved The Hunting Party, but I was kinda meh on The Paris Apartment. The Midnight Feast brings back so many of the elements I loved in The Hunting Party, but in a completely different environment with completely different characters.

I also loved the blend of posh and pagan for the setting in The Midnight Feast. With the mildest of spoiler warnings — hey! The thriller set in the creepy woods includes something creepy in the woods! — there’s a moment where a local contractor refuses to remove a certain kind of tree, despite being offered a great deal of money from the resort. The villager explains that it’s on his website, he won’t do it, and that’s just a perfect symbol of modern Tome village and of the power of the forest. The hotel, of course, doesn’t really care what some backward local says, and across all the storylines, it’s really the rich visitors’ disregard of the villagers and working-class people that powers the mystery.

Overall, such a page-turning thriller with an intriguing setting.