Book Review- The Hunting Party

Title: The Hunting Party

Author: Lucy Foley

Published: 24th January 2019

Pages: 394

Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

Everyone’s invited…everyone’s a suspect…

For fans of Ruth Ware and Tana French, a shivery, atmospheric, page-turning novel of psychological suspense in the tradition of Agatha Christie, in which a group of old college friends are snowed in at a hunting lodge . . . and murder and mayhem ensue.

All of them are friends. One of them is a killer.

During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they’ve chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands—the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves.

They arrive on December 30th, just before a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world.

Two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead.

The trip began innocently enough: admiring the stunning if foreboding scenery, champagne in front of a crackling fire, and reminiscences about the past. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group’s tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year’s Eve, the cord holding them together snaps.

Now one of them is dead . . . and another of them did it.

Keep your friends close, the old adage goes. But just how close is too close? -Goodreads

I received an eARC of this novel from Harper Collins UK in return for an honest review.

This is a fascinating crime novel written from a number of characters’ POVs and with a split narrative using flashbacks. This mixture of different techniques makes the mystery so much bigger, and the novel so much more clever than if it was told with just one POV and all in the present tense.

The novel is focussed on a group of friends who travel up from London to the Highlands of Scotland to celebrate New Year, but not all of them will make the return journey!!

In addition to not knowing the identity of the murderer, the reader also doesn’t know who has actually been murdered until the end of the novel too! I didn’t realise this when I began reading the novel, but it’s an amazing twist which definitely makes the novel stand out among other crime novels. Using the split narrative mentioned above, and the flashbacks, we are kept guessing the whole way through the novel,

The characters in the novel are well developed. The group of friends from London are all different from each other and realistic to how a group who have been friends for so long and have seen so many periods of each others lives would be, and all are also quite dislikeable, which was fun! So the fact that we didn’t know who had been murdered didn’t bother me in the same way cause I didn’t care for any the possible victims that much!! But there was a nice contrast between the group of friends visiting the Highlands, and the people who already worked on the estate, and Foley used this contrast to create an intense atmosphere and to draw attention to some interesting debates about wealth and privilege.

The novel is made up of short chapters, which combined with the many character POVs and use of flashbacks made the novel quite quick to read, even with the almost 400 pages, and it was difficult to put down!!

I enjoyed the murder mystery element to the novel, not knowing and not being able to guess what was happening or what was going to happen next was really refreshing, and I couldn’t put the novel down once I started reading it!!!

Overall I loved this novel! It’s a fascinating mystery novel with a plot full of twists and turns that keep the reader guessing the whole time!

You can buy the novel from The Book Depository here (affiliate link)

Happy reading!