Train of Thought

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

EVERYONE’S INVITED. EVERYONE’S A SUSPECT.

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.

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2.5

I’ve been in a reading slump for a few weeks now and my go-to fix for it is a good ol’ murder mystery. Something fast paced and with enough intrigue to keep me hooked right until the end. So when I found a copy of ‘The Hunting Party’ by Lucy Foley at a charity store, I was intrigued by the premise. ‘A murder among friends’, what could lead to that?

A group of old university friends travel to a lodge in the Scottish highlands for their annual New Years’ trip. Relations between the group start to fracture as secrets and buried resentments bubble to the surface. Not long after, the hunting lodge is cut off from the rest of the world as a snow storm hits, and when the body is found, no help can arrive.

The best part of the novel was the setting. Using an isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands, with harsh snowy conditions separating the group from the outside and forcing them to confront their inner demons, Foley builds the tension between the characters and the environment.

The story is divided into two timelines – before and after the murder – and takes place over three days with five different character POVs. From the outset, we know that a body has been discovered and part of the fun was not only trying to figure out the murderer, but also who the victim was. Foley offers a lot of red herrings and mysteries to figure out, like the dark and haunted pasts of the gamekeeper and lodge manager, who work and live on the grounds in seclusion. She also reveals enough backstory about the purposefully unlikeable 9 guests and their different relationships with each other to keep you wondering who would want to kill someone else in the group. There’s a lot of potential victims and suspects for you to guess from.

While I enjoy reading unlikeable characters, a lot of Foley’s characters in ‘The Hunting Party’ felt flat and 2D. Miranda, the Queen Bee, fell into a cliche of being this beautiful woman that no one can resist who has the perfect life. She’s got secrets over everyone and is happy to spill them whenever it suits her. She’s the centre of everything. As the story take place over three days, it’s very character driven, which is why I have an issue with the fact that the characters were boring. The red herrings and clues about the different characters were clunky and felt too obvious, which detracted from the intrigue of the murder mystery.

I was also confused by the different styles of writing in the POVs. One of them addresses the audience directly as indicated by the lines “in case you were wondering” and “You’re just going to have to take my word for it”. I wasn’t quite sure why the character was addressing the audience or what its purpose was.

The big reveals happen in less than a hundred pages and come about so dramatically that it took me out of the reading experience. I think the premise of the story had so much potential, with the eerie and desolate setting, but overall it felt flat to me.