Published: October 2019

Author: Lucy Foley

Published by: Harper Fiction

Genre: Thriller

Length: 416 pages / 10 hrs 4 minutes

Reading dates: 24 February-2 March 2023

EVERYONE’S INVITED.

EVERYONE’S A SUSPECT.

AND EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT IT.

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.

The Hunting Party begins as a group of friends travel to remote Scotland to celebrate new year together. They have all been friends since Oxford Uni and although their lives are busy and they don’t see each other as much, New Year is a tradition. Among the guests are married couple Miranda and Julian, Nick and his boyfriend Bo, Samira and Giles and their 6 month old baby, Emma and Mark and Katie. Emma is the outsider of the group (a least that’s how she feels, having not been at Uni with the others) and she has organised this weekend desperate to impress.

Told from various narrators we hear from the beautiful yet snobby Miranda, Katie who has always lived in Miranda’s shadow and feels like the odd one out being the only one not in a couple and Emma who also feels she doesn’t belong, despite being Mark’s girlfriend and part of the group for over 3 years. We also hear from two of the staff at the remote Scottish house they have hired – Heather the housekeeper and Doug the gamekeeper – both who have chosen to live in rural Scotland to escape their lives. As the book begins we hear a guest is missing and a body has been found. We then go back in time to the guests arriving at the lodge and learning the secrets they hold.

This has been on my TBR forever so I was thrilled to be able to listen to a copy via my library app. It works really well as an audio book with each narrator being done with a different voice (complete with Scottish accents for Heather and Doug). The narrators really bring the book and the characters to life. I did struggle a little at the beginning because all the characters are pretty horrid – entitled and spoilt and just not very nice people but after a while I didn’t mind that I didn’t like them! The secrets when they are revealed come thick and fast – I do wonder what people think of me when I’m walking the dog and listening to audio books as I’m sure I gasp and pull faces!

A thoroughly enjoyable mystery which kept me guessing until the very end, with characters you will love to hate, I really enjoyed The Hunting Party.

About the author

Lucy Foley studied English Literature at Durham and UCL universities. She then worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry – during which time she wrote The Book of Lost and Found, which was a bestselling debut of 2015.

Lucy now writes full-time, with her crime novels The Hunting Party and The Guest List being published in 2018 and 2020 respectively to critical acclaim.

Her newest novel, The Paris Apartment, published in March 2022, instantly took the number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list. It has sold in over 40 territories and the movie rights have been acquired by Sony.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lucyfoleytweets