I finished The Paris Apartment recently. Calling this a “review” doesn’t quite work—it reads more like a response. The book is good, not great, but it held my attention to the end. I abandoned Foley’s previous novel, The Guest List, partly because my library loan expired, but mostly because it didn’t feel worth finishing.
On the surface, The Paris Apartment is a locked-building mystery set in an elegant Parisian apartment house where the disappearance of a resident exposes a vertical stack of secrets. Jess Hadley arrives in Paris to stay with her half-brother Ben, only to find his apartment empty and Ben missing. She stays, watches, listens, and slowly begins to understand the building—and the people inside it.
Floor by floor, Foley introduces the residents: a watchful concierge; Antoine and Nick, a volatile restaurateur and his anxious partner; Mimi, an art student; and, at the top, Sophie and Jacques, a wealthy, untouchable power couple. It’s a twisty whodunnit, effective as an escape. But what lingered for me wasn’t the mystery — it was what the mystery revealed.
Ben wasn’t just living there. He was investigating. You see, Ben discovers that Nick, Antoine, and their father Jacques run a brothel called Le Petit Mort (the small death or an “orgasm” in French), trafficking women from Eastern Europe. Mimi, Nick, and Antoine are all adopted children of trafficked women. Sophie and Jacques are their parents. The family’s wealth, philanthropy, and moral posturing are built on systematic abuse.
Mimi discovers the truth of her adoption only after Ben lets her in on the research he’s doing.
When Jacques attacks Ben to silence him, Mimi can see the fight from her apartment. Mimi facing her true love over her asshole secretive abusive father races downstairs and kills her father to save her lover. Sophie cleans up the crime—not to protect justice, but to preserve the family. Bodies are hidden, lies are coordinated, and silence is enforced in the name of love and blood loyalty.
Ben survives. The exposé is published. But even justice is compromised: the trafficked women are given money and time to flee because exposure would destroy them as surely as silence would. They would have gotten away with it, if only Jess didn’t show up and ruin the plan!
What triggered me is how closely this story mirrors real life. Wealthy men who exploit women and convince themselves they are benevolent. Fathers who believe saving a child excuses the system that destroyed her mother. Men who hide behind religion, philanthropy, or “that’s just how it is there” while abusing women and girls.
The book’s quiet thesis is this: you cannot be both a moral authority and a predator. Men who try to reconcile those identities destroy everyone around them—and eventually themselves. Blood loyalty doesn’t redeem abuse. It only protects it.
For me, that’s the true horror of The Paris Apartment. Not the murder. Not the mystery. But the familiar, global pattern of men who believe morality bends for them — and families and systems that help them believe it.
I’m working on publishing my own expose of this travesty of inhumanity and injustice. Men with superiority complexes drift toward men like Epstein who can help them get their jollies with impunity. There’s one of those men sitting behind the resolute desk in the Oval Office. There’s one that claims to have loved me, but clearly doesn’t. These men are cowards. These men are disgusting. These men want obsequious obedience with impunity and without remorse. They demand servitude to them, because they are the Gods of their own stories. They “pray” to themselves so that they can prey on kids, children, adopted or not. And I, for one, am tired of it.
Le Café Witteveen 