“The Hunting Party” - Lucy Foley

📿 If it’s an atmospheric, intricately plotted thriller you are in search of, Lucy Foley is an absolute must-read. She is deft at both creating a chilling atmosphere, and then filling it with duplicitous people, each armed with an array of secrets. 

📿 Two pages in and I was sucked in: the atmostphere, the old friends with warring personalities; it’s a treat! As one shattering revealation slams into another, you may find your neck and shoulders tense as if you are absorbing the blows yourself.

📿 Let me emphasize what Foley is able to to with her chosen setting: the remote, utterly isolated hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands in the dead of winter. She plays with the ever-present threat of a blizzard totally disconnecting the lodge and its inhabitants from the rest ofthe world. In many ways, Foley’s skill at creating a chilling setting, reminds me of “The Sanatorium” by Sarah Pearse (see April 2021 post). But I think Foley puts those gothic thriller vibes to their fullest advantage.

📿 The novel is set more or less within a three day period: the arrival of the friends to the lodge, and when the body is found. Foley alternates between the POV of the vacationing friends Miranda, Katie, and Emma, Doug who is the gamekeeper at the lodge, and Heather who is the Corrin Loch Lodge live-in manager. Doug’s chapters are told in the third person omniscient, while the rest are in the first person.

📿 The characters are connected intricately, so I had to quickly jot down key details to keep them straight at the beginning of the novel.

• Emma (the new girl) is with Mark (Oxford)
• Miranda (Oxford) is with Julien (Oxford)
• Nick (Oxford) is with Bo
• Samira and Giles (both Oxford)
• Katie (Oxford, and childhood friend of Miranda)

📿 Foley laces the novel with certain idioms as a thematic refrain, constantly nudging the reader’s perceptions of the friends.

• They are “thick as thieves”.
• The friends are “birds of a feather”.
• “It takes one to know one”.

📿 I highly recommend THP, and really any of Foley’s novels - she clearly is a talented storyteller, with a knack for suspense.