On her first afternoon in the suite, a young wife notices a jar on the cocktail tray. It is rat poison, and somebody has stood an ornate silver spoon in it, the way a hotel might present sugar. Her husband looks at it, laughs, and calls it a practical joke by a man with a poor sense of humour. That is the opening move of Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley, and the first thing it establishes is that somebody in this building has done homework.
The second thing arrives at dinner: a nut tart sent to the table, ordered specially, for a man whose allergy is severe enough to be a matter of record. Poison and pastry, inside twenty-four hours. Nobody at the Grand Alpine has yet died, and the novel has already told its reader that this is not an argument that started here.
Somebody Has Been Reading the File
Anthony Narracott is a Conservative leadership contender in 1950, red-gold hair, a decoration for gallantry, and a war story that his wife has noticed changes slightly with every retelling. He walks with a limp when there is an audience and moves without one across a hotel bedroom at seven in the morning. He is a magnificent creation precisely because he is not subtle. Everyone can see what he is. Nobody has the standing to say so.
Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley spends its first third assembling people who might want him gone, and the ledger is unusually crowded even by the standards of this shelf. There is a wife whose inheritance has quietly disappeared into his career. A film star who has been promised a new life. An old comrade, broke and drinking, who was in the mountains with him in 1943. A dishevelled medical student in smeared spectacles who keeps trying to say one sentence to him and keeps being walked away from.
The pleasure of the book is that all of these are real motives rather than a lineup, and Foley gives each of them a first-person chapter to argue their own case.
Testimony Is the Real Subject of Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley
About a third of the way in, a flag goes up the hotel pole where the Swiss one should be. Black, frayed, antique, with a howling wolf and a name in French. A French maid clearing plates recognises it and cannot stop herself explaining who those people were, and that all of them died.
From that point the novel stops being about who wanted a politician dead and becomes something considerably more uncomfortable: an audit. Britain came out of that war with a great many decorated men and a great many corroborating witnesses who had conveniently not survived. The clandestine work of the period was, by design, undocumented and unwitnessed, which was the whole point of the organisation that ran it and is also its most convenient afterlife. If the only other person on a hillside is dead, a man can be anything he says he was.
Sitting underneath that is the gold. The novel is unsentimental about where the funding for the German war effort came from and where a good deal of it went afterwards, which is territory the historical record has spent eighty years slowly opening up through inventories of looted assets that nobody was ever able to return. A crate under a floor in a climbers’ hut is a small idea. What it stands on is not.
This is why the book earns its violence. The murders at the Grand Alpine are, structurally, a golden age puzzle with a timetable and a coffee flask. The thing they are attached to is a massacre.
The Risk Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley Takes With Miss Marple
It is a real one. Miss Marple is never a narrator. She appears exclusively through other people’s eyes, usually those of a companion who finds her by turns soothing, ridiculous and frightening.
The upside is enormous. The reader gets to watch her be dismissed. A frightened man calls her an ancient crone to her face. A film star assumes she wants an autograph. The hotel’s fake detective flirts with her. Every one of them is filing her under harmless, and the novel is quietly counting.
The downside is arithmetic. Withholding her voice also means withholding her presence, and there are eighty pages in the middle where the book becomes a well-made Foley thriller that happens to have Jane Marple in the corner of the frame.
Two other reservations about Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley, stated plainly:
- The romance is a tax. An attraction between one narrator and a newly arrived investigator is written with real charge and costs the book momentum it does not get back.
- The ending is reported, not staged. After a genuinely thrilling sequence above the treeline, the resolution is delivered a month later in a sitting room over cherry brandy. Elegant, very Christie, and slightly airless.
The Mountain Keeps Better Records Than Anyone Else
What lingers longest is the place. The Verglas toboggan run, rebuilt by hand every winter so that its bends are never quite the same twice. The glacier groaning at night like something turning over in its sleep. A snowfall so total that the hotel becomes a sealed room, and a light on the horizon the colour of a fresh bruise that the local men have always read as a warning.
Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley is very good on the fact that snow both hides and confesses. Footprints vanish within the hour. A set of tracks leading up towards the ice at dawn tells an old woman at a breakfast table exactly how many people were out in the night. And the mountain has an opinion of its own about the final act, expressed through the mechanism the Swiss avalanche service exists to forecast, which arrives as the most morally interesting event in the book.
Where to Go Next
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie remains the ancestor of every sealed-location novel of this kind, and the Alpine setting here is in open conversation with it. The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley shows the same narrator structure at work on her own material. For readers who came mainly for the fading movie star and her ghosts, Typewriter Beach by Meg Waite Clayton covers that era of Hollywood with more room to breathe.
What It Leaves You With
Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley is credited to two names on its jacket and the join is visible in the best way. The interiority, the glamour and the grief are Foley’s. The nuns, the dog and the hairdo are Christie’s, and they are the clues that solve it.
It is not flawless. It sags, it indulges its romance, and it lets its final arrest happen out of sight. But there is a moment near the end where an elderly woman is asked whether she felt any sympathy at all, and answers no, flatly, without softening it, because wickedness does not become less wicked for having been aimed at someone who deserved it.
Seventy years of St Mary Mead, and she has never sounded less like a comfort.