25 Books Where the Guests Should Have Stayed Home

I love a good murder mystery.

But apparently, I especially love them when you take a bunch of people, stick them somewhere they can’t easily leave, and then add a dead body.

The Guest List by Lucy Foley does exactly that.

It takes place during a wedding on a remote island off the coast of Ireland. The guests have history. Everyone has secrets.

And someone ends up dead.

Naturally.

It’s suspenseful, a little messy and has that trapped-together-with-a-murderer feeling that makes it really hard to put down.

So, if you’ve already finished The Guest List and you’re looking for something with the same vibe, these are the books I’d pick up next:

Books like The Guest List

An Unwanted Guest is probably my favorite book on this list.

It has everything I want from this kind of murder mystery: a remote hotel, a snowstorm, a bunch of strangers who don’t particularly trust each other and absolutely nowhere to go.

It also has that very Agatha Christie-esque setup where pretty much everyone is suspicious at some point.

And unlike some psychological thrillers that take 150 pages to actually get going, this one moves.

People start dying. Everyone gets increasingly paranoid. And you get to sit there trying to figure out which one of these people you definitely would not want to be trapped in a snowstorm with.

If you liked the isolated setting and closed group of suspects in The Guest List, this is the book I’d pick up first.

Read this if you like: locked-room mysteries, isolated hotels, snowstorms and trying to figure out the killer before the characters do.

Agatha Christie is basically the queen of putting a bunch of suspicious people in one place and letting murder happen.

And And Then There Were None might be the best example of it.

It’s an older book, so the writing definitely feels different from the modern psychological thrillers on this list. But the actual setup holds up ridiculously well.

Everyone is stuck on an island. Everyone has something in their past they’d rather not talk about. And every time someone dies, your list of possible suspects gets a little shorter.

Which should make figuring out the killer easier.

It does not.

If the closed-circle mystery was your favorite part of The Guest List, this is one of the classics that helped make that entire style of thriller what it is.

Read this if you like: classic whodunits, remote islands and suspecting literally everyone.

Apparently snowstorms are one of my favorite ways to trap fictional people with a murderer.

One by One has a very similar setup to The Guest List, except instead of wedding guests on an island, we get coworkers at a ridiculously nice ski chalet.

And these coworkers have some shit going on.

There’s tension within the company, plenty of reasons for people to dislike each other and, conveniently, absolutely nowhere to go once the weather turns.

I really like the claustrophobic feeling of this one. The chalet should feel cozy, but the longer everyone is stuck there, the less cozy it gets.

Read this if you like: snowy settings, workplace drama and being trapped somewhere beautiful with people you absolutely do not trust.

If you liked The Guest List, going directly to another Lucy Foley book is kind of an obvious choice.

The Hunting Party has a lot of the same things I loved about it: an isolated setting, multiple points of view and a group of people with a LOT of history.

Because these aren’t strangers.

They’re old friends who have known each other long enough to know exactly where the bodies are buried.

Figuratively, at first.

The friendships are messy, there are old grudges hanging around and the blizzard conveniently makes leaving pretty much impossible.

Basically, it’s a lovely reminder that sometimes the worst people to get trapped with are your friends.

Read this if you like: messy friendships, remote lodges and vacations with people who know way too much about each other.

Okay, this one feels almost too perfect for this list.

The Unwedding has the fancy wedding from The Guest List, the isolated setting and a whole resort full of people who suddenly can’t leave.

Except Ellery isn’t actually part of the wedding.

She’s recently separated and was supposed to be taking this trip with her husband. Instead, she’s there alone, watching a bunch of strangers celebrate their relationship while hers has basically imploded.

Then the groom dies.

Because apparently the universe decided her vacation wasn’t shitty enough.

I really like the outsider angle here. Ellery doesn’t have years of history with everyone involved, so she’s trying to piece together the relationships, secrets and potential motives right along with us.

Read this if you like: destination weddings, luxury resorts and vacations that go spectacularly off the rails.

Nothing says welcome to the family quite like becoming increasingly convinced your daughter should absolutely not marry these people.

The Last One at the Wedding is a little different from The Guest List because we’re following the bride’s father rather than bouncing between a whole group of suspicious wedding guests.

But the vibes are definitely there.

There’s an extravagant wedding. An isolated estate. An absurdly wealthy family.

And Frank cannot shake the feeling that something is very, very wrong.

The more he starts digging into his future son-in-law and his family, the weirder everything gets.

And, naturally, nobody particularly appreciates Dad trying to ruin the wedding.

Read this if you like: rich families with secrets, suspicious weddings and dads who absolutely cannot mind their own business.

Lucy Foley really does love gathering a bunch of people somewhere gorgeous and then making everything go horribly wrong.

And I support her.

The Midnight Feast takes place during the opening weekend of The Manor, an extremely fancy wellness resort where everything is supposed to be luxurious, exclusive and Instagram-worthy.

Except there’s some seriously dark history tied to the property.

There are also locals who aren’t exactly thrilled about the resort, guests with their own reasons for being there and plenty of secrets slowly working their way to the surface.

It’s not The Guest List 2.0, but it has a lot of the same things that make Foley’s books fun: multiple perspectives, a beautiful-but-creepy setting and the growing realization that basically nobody is telling you the whole story.

Read this if you like: luxury resorts, buried secrets and beautiful places where something feels very, very wrong.

Family gatherings can already be a lot.

Personally, I think adding murder is a little unnecessary.

Daisy Darker takes the locked-room setup and makes it even messier because everyone trapped together is related.

And this family has issues.

There are old grudges, complicated relationships and plenty of secrets that start coming out as the night gets progressively worse.

The house is also completely cut off when the tide comes in, which means nobody is leaving until morning.

Assuming, of course, they make it until morning.

This one also has a twist that makes it particularly fun if you like books that make you rethink what you’ve been reading.

Read this if you like: dysfunctional families, isolated houses and mysteries where absolutely nobody gets to leave.

This one takes the whole “trapped with people you don’t trust” thing VERY literally.

The Escape Room follows four ridiculously ambitious Wall Street coworkers who are used to competing with pretty much everyone—including each other.

So naturally, locking them together in an elevator goes beautifully.

As the escape room gets increasingly sinister, secrets about the group and the company they work for start coming out.

And these are not particularly nice people.

The setting is much smaller than The Guest List, but that almost makes it worse. There’s no wandering around a giant island trying to get away from everyone.

You’re in an elevator.

Good luck with that.

Read this if you like: actual locked rooms, terrible coworkers and watching rich people turn on each other.

Apparently, if a thriller describes somewhere as a luxury wellness retreat, I immediately assume someone is going to die.

The Retreat is the second book in Sarah Pearse’s Detective Elin Warner series, but you can absolutely read it on its own.

This time, Elin is investigating a suspicious death at an island resort that was built on the site of an old school with a seriously dark past.

Then another guest dies.

Because one suspicious death simply wasn’t enough.

I like this one for the setting more than anything. You’ve got the beautiful resort, the isolated island and a group of guests who came there expecting a relaxing getaway.

Instead, they get a murder investigation.

Read this if you like: creepy islands, luxury retreats and vacations that come with significantly more murder than advertised.

Being stuck on a boat is already a pretty effective way to make sure your characters can’t just leave when shit gets weird.

And shit gets weird pretty quickly in The Woman in Cabin 10.

Lo is on the trip for work, covering the maiden voyage of a fancy little luxury cruise ship.

One night, she hears a scream and sees what looks very much like a body disappearing into the water from the cabin next door.

Except everyone on the ship is accounted for.

Which leaves Lo trying to convince everyone that she definitely saw a murder while simultaneously figuring out who the hell the missing woman was.

It has that same closed-circle feeling as The Guest List: a small group of people, nowhere particularly useful to go and the growing suspicion that somebody around you knows exactly what happened.

Read this if you like: luxury cruises, unreliable witnesses and mysteries where everyone insists nothing happened.

There is something about sending people to a gorgeous private island that just screams this is going to end badly.

One Perfect Couple starts with Lyla agreeing to go on a reality show with her boyfriend, even though spending several weeks competing to be crowned the “perfect couple” isn’t exactly her dream vacation.

Then the storm hits.

Suddenly, the cameras and stupid reality show challenges don’t matter quite as much as the dwindling food, limited fresh water and the fact that nobody knows when—or if—help is coming.

And being stranded with a bunch of strangers gets significantly less fun when everyone starts realizing they might not all make it home.

This one leans a little more into survival thriller territory, but it still has that The Guest List feeling of taking a small group of people, cutting them off from the rest of the world and waiting for everything to fall apart.

Read this if you like: remote islands, reality TV drama and vacations that accidentally turn into survival situations.

Look, I understand the appeal of a deserted tropical island.

But thriller books have taught me that we should probably stop going to them.

Reckless Girls follows Lux and her boyfriend Nico, who agree to sail two women to Meroe Island—a remote paradise that comes with some decidedly less-than-paradisiacal stories attached to it.

When they arrive, there’s already another couple there.

At first, everyone drinks, swims and basically lives out the private-island fantasy.

But the group dynamic starts getting weird, secrets begin coming out and paradise becomes considerably less appealing.

This one has more of a slow-burn, vacation-gone-wrong feel than a traditional whodunit, but if the remote setting and messy group dynamics were what you loved about The Guest List, it fits.

Read this if you like: deserted islands, messy strangers and tropical vacations with extremely questionable vibes.

The Last House Guest isn’t quite as trapped-with-a-murderer as some of the other books on this list.

But it does have rich vacationers, complicated friendships and a town full of people who would really prefer that certain secrets stay buried.

So, naturally, I’m in.

Avery lives year-round in Littleport, a coastal Maine town where wealthy families show up every summer—including her best friend Sadie and her family.

When Sadie dies, Avery is left trying to figure out what actually happened.

And the deeper she digs, the more obvious it becomes that the picture-perfect vacation town is hiding some seriously messy shit.

There’s also a fun locals-versus-summer-people dynamic running through the book that makes basically everyone feel at least a little suspicious.

Read this if you like: wealthy vacation towns, messy friendships and digging into secrets everyone else would rather leave alone.

I love a wellness retreat in a thriller because you already know absolutely nobody is leaving well.

The Last Resort follows three struggling couples who sign up for a week at Harmony Resort, where celebrity therapists Miles and Grace Markell promise they can save their marriages.

Which is a pretty bold promise considering these people have some serious shit they haven’t told each other.

As the week goes on, secrets start coming out, relationships start unraveling and it becomes increasingly obvious that the people running the retreat might have a few secrets of their own.

Then a hurricane rolls in and cuts everyone off.

This one is more relationship drama and psychological suspense than classic whodunit, but the remote setting, messy group dynamics and everyone here is hiding something vibe make it a good fit.

Read this if you like: messy marriages, questionable wellness retreats and couples who probably should have just gone to therapy at home.

I feel like ridiculously high-paying nanny jobs in giant isolated houses should come with some kind of warning label.

The Turn of the Key actually starts with Rowan in prison, writing to a lawyer because she’s been accused of murdering one of the children in her care.

Which certainly gets your attention.

From there, we go back to her arrival at Heatherbrae House, where the parents promptly leave her alone with their kids in a house controlled by smart technology that is creepy as hell.

Lights turn on by themselves. Music starts playing. There are strange noises. And Rowan becomes increasingly convinced that something is seriously wrong with the house.

The setup is different from The Guest List, but it has the same isolated, claustrophobic feeling where you know something bad is happening—you just aren’t entirely sure who or what you should be suspicious of.

Read this if you like: creepy houses, isolated settings and narrators who may not be telling you everything.

Okay, this one is definitely less murder mystery and more what the actual hell is happening at this wellness retreat?

But I think it still belongs here.

In Nine Perfect Strangers, nine strangers arrive at Tranquillum House with various amounts of emotional baggage and the expectation that they’re going to spend ten days becoming healthier, happier versions of themselves.

Instead, they get Masha.

And Masha has a much more intense transformation planned than anyone signed up for.

This one is slower and much more character-focused than The Guest List, but I love the same basic setup: put a bunch of strangers in an isolated place, give everyone their own shit to deal with and then slowly reveal that something about the whole situation is very, very off.

Read this if you like: wellness retreats, complicated strangers and watching a relaxing vacation become progressively more unhinged.

If And Then There Were None is the classic island murder mystery, Murder on the Orient Express is the classic we are all trapped here until someone figures this shit out mystery.

And I love it.

Poirot is traveling aboard the Orient Express when one of the passengers is found dead in his compartment.

The train is stranded by heavy snow, which means the killer hasn’t exactly had an opportunity to make a quick getaway.

So, one of the passengers did it.

The fun is figuring out which one.

This is another older book, so it definitely reads differently than the modern thrillers on this list. But the basic setup—limited suspects, nowhere to go and everyone having something to explain—is still SO good.

Read this if you like: classic mysteries, suspicious strangers and murder investigations where the killer literally can’t leave.

Shutter Island is one of those books where the less you know going in, the better.

Teddy Daniels arrives on the island with his partner to investigate how a patient seemingly disappeared from a locked room at Ashecliffe Hospital.

Which is already weird.

Then the weather gets worse, the hospital staff start acting suspicious and Teddy becomes increasingly convinced that there’s a lot more happening on the island than anyone is telling him.

This one is darker and more psychological than most of the books on this list.

It also does a really good job of making you question what you actually know—which is exactly what I want from this kind of thriller.

And yes, there’s a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. But if you somehow haven’t had the ending spoiled for you yet, read the book first.

Read this if you like: isolated islands, unreliable perspectives and mysteries that make you question basically everything.

This one is definitely more of a vibe match than a traditional locked-room mystery.

But holy shit, this family has secrets.

The Family Upstairs follows multiple characters and timelines as we slowly find out what happened inside Libby’s childhood home—and why she was found there as a baby while three adults were dead downstairs.

Totally normal family history.

There’s money, manipulation, a creepy cult-like household and a LOT of information that has been conveniently left out of Libby’s life story.

I really like the way this one slowly pieces everything together. You know something seriously f*cked up happened in that house from the beginning.

You just don’t know exactly what.

Read this if you like: dysfunctional families, creepy houses and slowly uncovering years of very dark secrets.

As someone who writes for a living, being locked away for a month and told to produce an entire book already sounds mildly terrifying.

Then The Writing Retreat makes it significantly worse.

Alex is invited to an exclusive writing retreat at the home of famous horror author Roza Vallo, along with four other aspiring writers—including her former best friend.

So, the vibes are already awkward.

Then Roza announces that everyone has to write a complete novel during the retreat, with a publishing deal waiting for the winner.

Things get increasingly weird from there.

There’s competition, old friendship drama, a creepy house and the growing realization that this retreat is absolutely not what anyone thought they signed up for.

Read this if you like: creepy mansions, competitive writers and retreats with deeply questionable admission requirements.

Look, I have seen enough horror movies to know that if the listing says secluded, I’m probably staying home.

In Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six, The group heads to this luxury cabin for what is supposed to be a relaxing weekend away.

Except things feel off pretty much immediately.

The host is a little weird. There’s a creepy owner watching from a nearby property. A storm is rolling in.

Oh, and everyone has some shit they aren’t talking about.

This one mixes the isolated getaway with family drama and a mystery that actually starts before anyone arrives at the cabin.

It’s messy, creepy and exactly why I personally require both Wi-Fi and an escape route when booking accommodations.

Read this if you like: creepy cabins, messy family secrets and vacations where leaving suddenly isn’t an option.

Okay, this one gets weird.

In a good way.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle takes the classic country-house murder mystery and throws a time loop into the middle of it.

Aiden wakes up at Blackheath with basically no idea what the hell is happening.

He eventually learns that Evelyn Hardcastle will die that night—and the only way he can escape is by solving her murder.

Except every time the day starts over, he experiences it as a different guest at the house.

Which means you’re not only trying to figure out who killed Evelyn. You’re also trying to figure out who everyone is, what they know and how all of these pieces fit together.

It’s definitely one of the stranger books on this list, but the giant house, closed group of suspects and everyone-has-a-secret setup makes it a really fun twist on the traditional whodunit.

Read this if you like: country-house mysteries, complicated puzzles and books that make you wonder what the actual f*ck is happening.

Nothing fixes a struggling marriage quite like being snowed in together somewhere deeply unsettling.

In Rock, Paper, Scissors, Adam and Amelia have been married for ten years, and things aren’t exactly going great.

So when they win a weekend away at a remote chapel in the Scottish Highlands, they decide this could be exactly what they need.

It is not.

The place is creepy. Strange things start happening. And it becomes pretty obvious that this trip wasn’t nearly as random as Adam thinks it was.

I really like this one because there are fewer characters than in The Guest List, but you still get that same claustrophobic feeling of being stuck somewhere while secrets slowly come out.

And there are a LOT of secrets.

Read this if you like: messy marriages, snowed-in settings and couples who desperately need to tell each other the truth.

Apparently Lucy Foley doesn’t actually need to strand everyone on an island to make a building feel impossible to escape.

The Paris Apartment swaps the remote setting for a gorgeous old apartment building in Paris where everyone seems to know something about Jess’s missing brother.

Nobody wants to tell her what that something is.

The residents are wealthy, weird and increasingly suspicious the more Jess starts digging.

And because they all live in the same building, you still get that closed-circle feeling I love from The Guest List. The suspects aren’t trapped by a snowstorm or a tide.

They’re just all conveniently living on top of each other.

This one feels a little less like a traditional whodunit than some of Foley’s other books, but it has the multiple perspectives, messy secrets and literally everyone is hiding something energy that she does so well.

Read this if you like: suspicious neighbors, beautiful old buildings and mysteries where everyone knows more than they’re telling you.

So, What’s The Guest List Actually About?

If you somehow made it this far without actually reading The Guest List, we should probably talk about that.

Lucy Foley’s murder mystery takes place during a very fancy wedding on a very remote island off the coast of Ireland.

Which, obviously, goes extremely well.

The bride and groom have gathered their friends and family for the weekend, but pretty much everyone arrives with some kind of baggage.

There are old grudges. Messy relationships. Secrets people would very much prefer to keep secret.

Then someone ends up dead.

The story jumps between different characters and timelines as you slowly figure out not only who died, but who might have wanted them dead.

Basically, if you like closed groups of suspicious people, isolated settings and trying to solve the murder before the book tells you what the hell happened, it’s worth reading.

So, What Should You Read Next?

If you only pick one book from this list, I’m still going with An Unwanted Guest.

I LOVE a good locked-room-style mystery, and trapping a bunch of strangers in a hotel during a snowstorm while someone starts killing them is apparently exactly what I want from literature.

Who knew?

If you want something even closer to The Guest List, though, try The Unwedding. You get another fancy wedding, an isolated location, a dead body and a whole bunch of people with secrets.

For something a little weirder, go with The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.

And if you just want more Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party or The Midnight Feast are probably where I’d head next.

Basically, there are a concerning number of ways to trap fictional people together and murder one of them.

And apparently, I would like to read all of them.

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