The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lucy Foley’s “The Hunting Party” is an excellent claustrophobic psychological thriller that questions how well people really know each other.
Nine entitled friends travel to the Scottish Highlands for a New Year’s Celebration where a tragedy occurs. The story is told in two timelines, events leading up to the disappearance of one of the guests, narrated in the first person by three of the female guests, and the aftermath, again in the first person, by the female caretaker of the Highland Lodge. At intervals, we also learn, in a third person narrative, about the estate’s gamekeeper, a man with a hidden past.
The story is full of red-herrings and misdirection and the author cleverly hides the identity, and even the gender, of the missing guest, a technique that is only very rarely apparent to the reader - there were a couple of occasions where I thought, “wouldn’t it have been more natural for the character to say the name”, but they were few and far between and did not spoil my enjoyment of the story.
There are few, if any, likeable characters in the novel and even the best of them have some darkness in their past that affects their actions but that is not a criticism - they all rang true, and it is fun to piece together what is really behind the unreliable narrators. Apparently optioned for TV, the story would make an excellent miniseries.


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