The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Crime
Pages: 416
Published By: HarperFiction on 31st October, 2019
Format: Paperback
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Book Synopsis:
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.
Book Review
This is my first Lucy Foley book and I felt so disappointed. She has a lot of hype surrounding her as an author. It’d been on my TBR for a while but I ended up buddy reading this with a follower on Instagram! After finishing the book, I worried that the problem might be me, but during our buddy read discussions, they agreed with many of the issues I noticed.
My main issue I have with this book is that we don’t even know who the victim is… Even when we get later into the book, we only find out what their gender is. Due to this, it didn’t feel like a mystery to solve because withholding vital information takes all the fun out of it.
Within a mystery/thriller book I like to have clues, reveals, investigations and progress throughout to help me feel like I am involved in the story… This was very lacking and when I expected to find out things… it didn’t end up happening.
There were too many characters to keep track of and this wasn’t helped by the use of multi POV. Even though I couldn’t remember half of them, the drama between them was eye-roll worthy and the group as a whole was unlikeable. Rich, pretentious characters are a tough sell for me, and unfortunately, this book leaned heavily into that trope. I enjoy dislikeable characters if done well, but this group had no redeeming features, and I couldn’t have cared less about their outcomes. They’ve supposedly been friends for decades, but if they acted like that with me, they’d have been binned immediately.
I loved the setting for this book (the Scottish Highlands) and felt it the perfect place to get away for a New Years celebration with friends. The author described the setting well throughout. At points it I felt it had been over described – almost to just fill empty pages.
The book eventually did all come together and the ending I enjoyed somewhat. In my opinion, it had such a promising premise that ended up being a missed opportunity. Maybe if I’d have listened to the audiobook, it might have helped keep track of all the characters better. To conclude, after reading this book, I am feeling reluctant to try any of the other ones she has written which is a shame…
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