THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“My favorite kind of whodunit, kept me guessing all the way through, and reminiscent of Agatha Christie at her best — with an extra dose of acid.” — Alex Michaelides, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Silent Patient Everyone’s invited…everyone’s a suspect…During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford … 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.
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Ahhh! So good and so frustrating!
Did it keep me on my toes? Yes and no. Some parts were predictable, other parts were not.
I second guessed my suspicions at times and I kept thinking “please don’t let this person be involved!”
The settings and the character developments were spot on! The “locked room mystery” plot really grasped my attention.
Definitely reminded me of a Ruth Ware or Tana French novel with some Agatha Christie thrown in!
A mysterious and atmospheric whodunnit.
An annual reunion of friends at a new location with the added beauty and terror of a huge snowstorm that cuts everyone off from the rest of the world is where THE HUNTING PARTY begins and where we meet the characters.
The reunion starts off with a long ride from the train station to the remote lodge with a scary gamekeeper as the driver, the juggling of who gets what cabin, the first-night dinner together, and finding out there is another couple in residence as well as the group of friends.
The group has been friends for a long time, but do they really know each other? Are they jealous of each other? Why do they do this reunion every year? They all seem to have secrets and pasts that the others don’t know about.
The first-night dinner brings many feelings about each other and frightening feelings about the couple from Iceland. They are poorly dressed and seem most interested in the hunting party that has been arranged.
Along with the Lodge guests, we meet mysterious Heather. She seems all organized and put together on the outside, but she has her secrets and something in her past that she wants to forget.
THE HUNTING PARTY lets us get to know the guests very well. Actually a little too well…going into all the detail about their lives past and present got a bit too much, but I guess it was necessary for the reader to get the full impact of the reunion and events.
We are taken from the festivities to Doug, the gamekeeper, finding a body and showing Heather where he found it. When Heather sees the body, she knows it wasn’t an accident.
Waiting to find out which one of the friends was the victim and who the killer was kept the tension high. The identity was not made known until the very end. The mystery was a well-kept secret.
Ms. Foley’s writing is very descriptive and beautiful. I could see every detail of the landscape and feel the emotions of each character. If you can describe writing as lush, that is how beautiful the sentences flowed and created a picture.
If you enjoy a mystery, antics of characters, learning that the characters really didn’t show their true colors, and waiting for the “ball to drop,” THE HUNTING PARTY will be a book you will want to read.
The story line was perfectly carried out and nothing was revealed until the very end. It was an interesting study of personalities. 4/5
This book was given to me as an ARC by the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
I was really looking forward to this, but I found both the characters and the story flat and unoriginal. There was a nice twist at the end, but it took way too long to get there. I did like the setting though and thought it was very creepy.
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.
A decade ago they were friends at Oxford & decide to have a getaway for the New Year in a remote Scottish lodge, they are cut off by snow. Someone ends up dead.
I found myself engrossing in this thriller it harks back to a Christie novel & has lots of twists & turns. They were friends years ago but very quickly the cracks appear & do they actually like each other now. I liked how the book flipped from the present to a few days earlier when they arrived. I also liked that the victim was a mystery for quite a way into the book. The characters were well drawn & I liked it that they were all unlikeable. A different read for me but one that I really enjoyed & I look forward to reading more from the author
My honest review is for a special copy I voluntarily read
Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this book, The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley.
As I presume this was an ARC and not the final copy I have not deducted stars for the poor formatting issues. It did cause a few problems, but the story was enjoyable so I tried to ignore it and I got to the end rather quickly.
The story is about a well educated group of friends who all meet up every New Years Eve. it has become an annual ‘must do’, even though there are obvious cracks in some of the relationships. This year they head to Scotland to a hunting lodge, which is extremely isolated. Each chapter in the book is narrated from a character, so as a reader you get to understand the different points of view from all sides of the group.
A true murder mystery book in the sense that you know there has been a murder, but it is not until most of the way through you find out who has been murdered, which is weird because that character is still telling the story. The end, for me happens much too quickly and neatly.
The author manages to create a great atmosphere of the whodunit, by using the different voices and the whole lodge and the isolation works well. I have to admit to have struggled trying to identify which character was doing what. even though each chapter was name for the character speaking, some of them were so similar in ‘voice’ I got confused many time and had to go back to see who was talking.
All in all a good mystery, but maybe it needs a few tweaks to make it a great mystery. I would recommend this book to lovers of mysteries.