The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

*The Sunday Times No.1 bestseller*

EVERYONE’S INVITED.
EVERYONE’S A SUSPECT.
AND EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT IT.

‘Ripping, riveting’ A. J. Finn
‘Clever, twisty and sleek’ Daily Mail
‘Unputdownable’ John Boyne
‘Foley is superb’ The Times
‘Chilling’ Adele Parks
‘Terrific, riveting’ Dinah Jefferies

In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather for New Year.

The beautiful one
The golden couple
The volatile one
The new parents
The quiet one
The city boy
The outsider

The victim.

Not an accident – a murder among friends.

• ISBN13: 9780008297114
• Publish Date: 24 January 2019 (first published 4 October 2018)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 29 April 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 400
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[maggiefan]

It was kind of boring

[nora]

I started this book in October, but it took me so long to ready that I still managed to finish this New Year's story just after New Year's. How fortuitous.

This book has quite a sizable cast of characters, and to be honest I was a bit bored getting to know them all, which is why it took my over two months to get through.
But the story really picks up once the plot gets going around two thirds in, and I'm still tempted to give a four star rating just because the ending was fun.

[bearley]

Slow burn for the first half of the book. Too similar to the author’s previous novel, but without the same spark.

[Leigha]

A group of friends take their annual vacation to a remote resort in the wilderness in this fun, if flawed, adult mystery.

I am so glad I picked this audiobook up on a whim. The narration for the five main characters (yes, you read that right, five different POVs) was spot on. All of them did an absolutely amazing job. Non-linear timelines typically drive me absolutely crazy, but not knowing the identity of the victim or the killer until the end made it an intense read. All of the characters have their little secrets, which are slowly revealed as the story progresses. I didn’t like all of the perspectives, but I certainly understood the various motivations of each character.

It’s not a perfect story – two of the POV characters could have easily been cut from it (what, exactly, did Heather and Doug contribute to the story other than excellent voice acting?), it had way too many red herrings, and the epilogue should have provided more insight into how the events of the novel impacted the rest of gang. And yet, it kept me highly entertained from beginning to end, much more so than Ruth Ware’s One By One (which had very similar elements). I would not have enjoyed this book nearly as much if I had read it.

tl;dr Excellent audiobook narration paired with fun twists and surprises had me enjoying it from beginning to end.

[Quirky Cat]

Lucy Foley introduces a world reminiscent of Agatha Christie's suspense in The Hunting Party.

It's the holidays, and that means it's time for one group of longstanding friends to take a trip like no other. Though they probably weren't expecting what sort of events would make it so memorable for them.

The group heads off to an isolated lodge – in the winter – in hopes of having an eventful New Years. They certainly got that, as one of them would be dead before the holiday season is over. To make matters worse – they're all suspects, and trapped together.

“But it is a lot easier to face the day when you know you won't have to face other people and their happiness.”

If you've read any of Agatha Christie's works (or Ruth Ware's One By One), then The Hunting Party is going to have a lot of familiar tones and elements for you. That is not automatically a bad thing, especially as Foley attempted to play around with the general concept.

We all know the tale. A group of friends (or co-workers, or even strangers), gets trapped in an isolated location, and then the unthinkable occurs. A murder is discovered, making everyone present a suspect.

Panic ensues, right? Well, that's kind of where The Hunting Party deviates. The whole story is set in two periods of time; before the murder, and after. Much of what follows after is limited to just a couple of characters, who seem to keep their heads on straight. Mostly.

Everything before the murder is setting the scene, and showing just how true it is that they're all suspects. That part is quite nicely done. As is the building of suspense. There was a large amount of this book where I sincerely didn't know who died, let alone who the murderer was.

Ultimately though, I feel like the book kind of fell flat for me. There wasn't much of an emotional investment in it. Perhaps at least in part because we didn't really see the group reacting to said murder. Not much, at any rate.

One could argue that their reactions weren't the focus, but I feel like that is one of several decisions that removed the human element in the story. Ironic, in a way, I know. The group consisted of several characters (Miranda, Katie, Mark, Giles, Samira, Julien, and Emma), yet there are a few that we learn next to nothing about.

Then again, there are a few who I would be quite happy to never meet in real life, so I guess it's all a balancing act, as per usual. Overall this was a decent thriller, especially as a read for around the holidays. I just wish that Lucy Foley had pushed certain elements a little bit harder.

Check out more reviews over at Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks

[alisoninbookland]

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Another quick read from Foley. It's hard to really like-like the story since they're all terrible people.

[ibeforem]

The Hunting Party is about an ill-fated annual New Year's trip taken by a group of 9 friends - four couples and a singleton. Since Miranda is the queen bee of the group, it might be easiest to explain who everyone is related to her:

Miranda and Julien (her husband)
Mark (used to be obsessed with Miranda) and his girlfriend, Emma (the trip organizer)
Samira (Miranda's "fun" best friend) and her husband Giles (and they have a baby with them)
Nick (the gay friend) and his husband Bo
Katie (Miranda's "serious" best friend)

All of them except Emma, Giles, and Bo have been friends since university or before, and have taken many of these New Year's jaunts together. But never in a place as unusual as the isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands. They discover that they are going to be hours from civilization, with hardly a working cell signal. Not something these metropolitan friends are particularly used to. But Emma has an elegant experience planned for them all -- until things start going wrong.

First, it seems like some of them are a little out of sorts. The passage of time and life has maybe meant that they are not as open with each other as they used to be. Then, they discover that they are not going to be the only visitors to the estate -- a strange Icelandic couple is also there. A snowstorm rolls in, further isolating the estate. The New Year's Eve party gets a little wild. And then -- a body is found.

You actually find out about the body very early in the story, but you don't know who it is or even what their gender is. The story alternates between the present, as they wait for the police to make it through the snowstorm, and the past 3 days. The present chapters are seen through the eyes of Heather, the manager of the estate, which helps to keep things a mystery.

Overall I thought this was an entertaining story, and I found that I was surprised by the twists and turns. I sort of had an idea of what the overall story of the estate was, but I wasn't quite right. I think it's a pretty solid "closed-door" mystery/thrill.

[brokentune]

Miranda stands up and fires the cork into the loch, where it makes its own series of ripples, widening out in shining rings across the water. We drink straight from the bottle, passing it around like Girl Guides, the cold, densely fizzing liquid stinging our throats.
‘It’s like Oxford,’ Mark says. ‘Sitting down by the river, getting pissed after finals at three p.m.’
‘Except then it was cava,’ Miranda says. ‘Christ – we drank gallons of that stuff. How did we not notice that it tastes like vomit?’
‘And there was that party you held down by the river,’ Mark says. ‘You two’ – he gestures to Miranda and me – ‘and Samira.’
‘Oh yes,’ Giles says. ‘What was the theme again?’
‘The Beautiful and Damned,’ I say. Everyone had to come in twenties’ gear, so we could all pretend we were Bright Young Things, like Evelyn Waugh and friends. God, we were pretentious.

"Were"? Why the past tense? These people are still annoying. Incredibly irritating actually.

They are a group friends in their 30s who were all at Oxford together and are now spending New Years Eve at a lodge in the Scottish Highlands.

I have a lot of issues with this book. And I mean, A LOT of issues, starting with the characters, who all behave as if they are in their early 20s, not their 30s. None of them seem to have had a life. Any life.
And as much as Foley may have tried to re-create the Bright Young Things one might find in an Agatha Christie mystery, all of her characters are self-absorbed, arrogant, vapid, vacuous snobs.

I also have issues with the setting of the "lodge in the Scottish Highlands" because it seems to have been written by someone who doesn't believe in research.

And last of all, the writing is pretty bad. Any writer who has to resort to dropping brand names to describe something, has lost with me. Any writer who tries to define their characters by their fashion choices, is worse. Add a chick lit tone of narration to it, and I am out.

DNF @ p. 81 of 391