Book Review: The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party (at a glance)
Author: Lucy Foley
Genre: Thriller / Murder mystery
Published: 2018
My rating: ★★★★☆
Best for: Fans of locked-room mysteries, unlikeable characters, and twisty, fast-paced thrillers
The Hunting Party Review
Within just a few pages of The Hunting Party, I knew this was exactly my kind of thriller. I ended up reading it in less than a day, completely hooked on uncovering who killed whom and why.
The story follows a group of old Oxford University friends who reunite to celebrate New Year’s Eve at a remote lodge in the Scottish Highlands.
When heavy snowfall cuts them off from the outside world, and one of them goes missing, the atmosphere turns from fun and nostalgic to… deeply unsettling.
Someone has been murdered, and it’s clear that everyone has something to hide and a reason to kill.
This story is told through multiple perspectives (both the guests and the lodge staff), which works brilliantly. The use of multiple perspectives is now Lucy Foley’s trade mark writing style, but the Hunting Party is her first novel, and, at the time, this style seemed innovative to me.
With each chapter, new motives and hidden tensions come to light, and you start to realise just how much resentment sits beneath the surface of these long-standing friendships. Foley has a real talent for structuring a narrative so that suspicion constantly shifts. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, something new is revealed.
It’s somewhat similar to Gone Girl in that sense, but you’re reading many more perspectives as you try to piece reality together.
One of the most interesting aspects is that there isn’t a single truly likeable character.
You’re not rooting for anyone, and you’re trying to work out who’s capable of what.
It makes the whole reading experience feel slightly voyeuristic, like you’re peeling back the layers of a very toxic social circle.
But I loved it.
Foley reveals a dark side to these long-term friendships that gives weight to this story and makes every interaction feel loaded. These aren’t strangers thrown together; they’re people who know each other extremely well.
The pacing is sharp, addictive, and makes this incredibly easy to race through. There are short, punchy chapters, and I found myself constantly saying “just one more chapter” until suddenly I was at the end.
And, crucially, I didn’t manage to guess the killer.
Every character felt like a plausible suspect right up until the reveal, which is exactly what you want from a thriller like this.
A small detail that made this particularly memorable for me is that there’s a reference at the end to a real-life incident involving an Oxford student and a breadknife, which, somewhat bizarrely, genuinely happened at my own college.
It added an extra eerie layer to an already atmospheric read, and I’d love to know if that detail was added because Foley knew about that real-life incident or if it’s a freaky coincidence!
If you enjoy locked-room mysteries, unreliable characters, and an eerie, remote setting, this is absolutely worth adding to your list of books to read.
I went straight on to Foley’s next book afterwards, and if you like this one, you probably will too.
I’ve now read all of Foley’s books, but the Hunting Party remains my favourite of her works, and I’d highly recommend it.
Love the sound of The Hunting Party? Grab a copy here:
Amazon | Bookshop.org (UK)
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