The Hunting Party

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

Published by Harper Collins

January 2019

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.

A group of university friends spend New Years Eve at a remote lodge in the wilds of Scotland.  They spend every New Year together and this year it is Emma who has arranged the trip.  She is a veritable new-comer to the group, being Mark's girlfriend but she is determined to make an effort and create a memory no one will forget.  Things start badly when they discover that their train ticket seats aren't all together, but surely that's only a minor blip and won't spoil the actual trip itself.  When they arrive at the station they are greeted by Doug the gamekeeper and are prepped with the rules and regulations of being out in the wild, especially as the weather is about to get worse and they could be literally snowed in with no way in or out.  

The group have changed since their uni days, no one remains the same, and it is apparent from the offset that their is tension among them.  One couple have insisted on bringing their baby along, the men are all trying to be 'top dog' and well, something isn't sitting quite right amongst the girls either.  By the end of the trip one member of the party will be dead.  The question is who dies, and who killed them?

Lucy Foley brings up the whole question of friendships, and of whether these are sometimes maintained out of  the feeling of necessity rather than from an actual desire to want to remain friends.  There weren't many really likeable people in this story out of the group of friends, and I did spend most of the book wondering which of those was going to meet a gritty end - I wasn't sorry to learn who it was! Then came the next game - trying to work out who had killed them.  

The Hunting Party is a great atmospheric novel and worked well being set in the middle of nowhere to give it a darker edge.

Happy Reading

Miss Chapters x