The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

Val Penny ♦ January 22, 2021 ♦ Leave a comment

I was given The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley as a birthday gift. I was pleased to receive it because I had heard lots of good things about it. I had not read anything by this author before, so I was intrigued.

The Blurb

n 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 Review

The story in The Hunting Party is about a group of friends who travel from London to the highlands of Scotland to spend the New Year Holiday in a remote hunting lodge. The only other guests at the resort are a man and a woman from Iceland. The story is told from the point of view of the two members of staff at the lodge and the female friends in the group.

The narrative jumps over the period from New Year’s Eve until January second. I usually try to avoid books where the passage of time jumps forward and back as the story does in The Hunting Party but in this novel, the passage of time is so short and the chapters so well identified that it didn’t matter very much. Certainly not enough to spoil my enjoyment of the book.

However, there are some short comings in the story-telling: the reader does no get told enough about the Icelandic couple to give them clues as to their importance. Neither is enough light shone on the victim or the perpetrator of the crime. As a result of this, there is a lengthy information dump at the end of the novel. This was disappointing because there was so much jumping backwards and forwards in time, reminiscing about the thoughts and experiences of the friendship group, the information dump could have been avoided.

Having said that, until that end point, the novel is gripping and beautifully paced. I enjoyed The Hunting Party. It would be a good book group read and I would recommend it to those who enjoy a good mystery.

The Author

Lucy Foley studied English Literature at Durham and UCL universities and worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry, before leaving to write full-time. The Hunting Party is her debut crime novel, inspired by a particularly remote spot in Scotland that fired her imagination.

Lucy is also the author of three historical novels, which have been translated into sixteen languages. Her journalism has appeared in ES Magazine, Sunday Times Style, Grazia and more.

Val Penny