The Hunting Party
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Manufacturer: Lucy Foley
Brand: Thriller, Mystery, Suspense, Murder Mystery, Psychological Thriller
Brew: Audiobook
Steeping Time: 10 hours 11 minutes
Tea Service: Personal Choice
Strength: 
Synopsis: Everyone’s invited…everyone’s a suspect…
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.
The trip begins 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, just as a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world.
Two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead…and another of them did it.
Keep your friends close, the old adage says. But how close is too close?
DON’T BE LEFT OUT. JOIN THE PARTY NOW.
As the Spice Girls once said, ‘friendship never ends.’
Unfortunately, we all know it does, and The Hunting Party shows that sometimes a friendship crashes and burns in a blaze of glory. Or murder. Whichever.
I love murder mysteries, especially those that have good Agatha Christie vibes. I want twists and turns, and I want to be guessing till the end. The Hunting Party had all of those things, but for some reason, it just didn’t grip me. I didn’t guess who the murderer was, and, for that matter, I didn’t even guess who the murder victim was until the end.
The narration is from a few different perspectives throughout the book. I listened to the audiobook and there were different narrators for each character perspective, which was really nice. I think I might have found it more confusing to have read a physical copy, but the different narrators really helped out. We experience this story through the following characters: Doug, a man hiding a dark secret who is the gamekeeper at the lodge. Heather, a woman harboring a deep hurt who also works at the lodge. Katie, the plain, quiet friend in the group. Miranda, the pretty, entitled one in the group. And Emma, the newest addition to this group of old friends.
The timeline jumps around a little depending on which character is narrating the chapter.
Most of Doug and Heather’s chapters are set after the murder, while the friends are all set in the days leading up to the murder. The book is written in first-person present, and I struggled to get used to that. I think this is the first (or perhaps the second) book I’ve read written in that tense, and I’ve learned it’s not my favorite. I eventually adjusted and I don’t think it would put me off in the future, but it took me a while.
Lucy Foley does a good job at throwing in red herrings. There are so many things that could have importance, but that doesn’t mean they actually do. It’s like being in a hall of mirrors at a carnival. There’s no telling what is real or meaningful, and I love that in a murder mystery. Nearly every character in the book could be the murderer. For that matter, any of them could have been the murder victim for the first half of the book. The gender of the victim is kept under wraps for so long, which I’ve also never experienced in a murder mystery novel. While I found it odd, it did intensify the whodunit factor.
The thing I didn’t expect from this book was the intense backstory of the friends.
So much of the story is about their history together, which is understandable, seeing how their long-term friendships play a major part in the dynamics. But I found myself craving for more of the present-moment mad dash to figure out what the hell is going on. The suspense among the survivors, knowing a killer is not only amongst them but is also a friend, just wasn’t there.
Another aspect I didn’t see coming was all the sex. Not like romance novel sex, but real, raw sex. I don’t have an issue with that, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. If sex scenes aren’t you’re thing, you may want to pass on this book. There were two distinct, graphic scenes and then a few other lesser mentions of past experiences. Again, not horrible, just unexpected.
I really wanted to like this book more than I did.
Perhaps it was the fact that I was on the waitlist for months to get the audiobook from the library, but I had built up such a hype for it in my head, and in the end, it didn’t hit the mark. I enjoyed it, don’t get me wrong, it just wasn’t what I was hoping it would be. The final reveal of the murderer and victim was a little anticlimactic for me, and I felt it was missing that intense in-the-moment suspicion amongst the guests. It’s very well written and has great character development, but it happened to not quite be my cup of tea.
If you enjoy psychological thrillers or suspense novels, this might be a good choice for your next read. If you’re hoping for an Agatha Christie-style novel, don’t get your hopes too high. Agatha Christie is one of my favorite authors, and she has set the bar ridiculously high. Unfortunately, The Hunting Party didn’t quite hit that mark for me.
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Cheers,
Lydia
Great post, I agreed with most of what you said. I, too, was not expecting or amused by all the sex that was in the book, it sort of put me off and I feel like much more could’ve been done to make this an amazing book.
Those surprise scenes definitely threw me for a loop! And I agree, there was so much more that could have really made this novel shine for me. Ah well, I guess they can’t all hit the mark!