Promise lost in style of Cluedo
It’s New Year’s Day in a remote Scottish lodge; 11 London-based friends are there on holiday but one has been missing for 24 hours. The gamekeeper finds a body, and believes foul play is involved. Thick snow prevents the police from reaching them however, leaving the employees and guests trapped with no idea who might be responsible.
It’s a salaciously promising set-up, one that evokes The Shining by way of Agatha Christie. If that was the crux of The Hunting Party ,it could easily be a thriller in the making. Instead, no sooner has a gory mystery been established, we instead jump back three days to when the London group began their stay.
Author Lucy Foley makes the odd decision to ignore the claustrophobic setting she’s created and instead tell her story primarily through flashbacks. Her three narrators – angsty Katie, domineering Miranda and demure Emma – are vessels through which Foley hopes to create tension, the three analysing and unpacking everything their friends and lovers do.
It leaves Heather, an employee at the lodge charged with looking for the lost guest, to narrate the “present day” scenes. Foley tries valiantly to make Heather seem integral to the plot, even shoe-horning in a sad backstory, but the whole character arc feels designed to drag the mystery beyond comprehension.
It does little to generate tension and therein lies The Hunting Party’s main flaw. Foley seems to equate a lack of information with suspense, overcompensating by trying to make every character seem vaguely suspicious.
We’re meant to keep guessing who’s died and who killed them but by the time Foley gets around to gendering the body halfway through, she’s skewed the narrative in such a way anyone can work out who the victim is.
For the novel is too focused on this group of friends for it to have been anyone else. It’s the one area where The Hunting Party succeeds, honing in on those tensions felt only between long-time friends. Every relationship between the other guests is laid bare, often far too bluntly, but Foley weaves a tangled web of resentment and distrust that feels unhealthily familiar.
If there wasn’t a corpse involved and it was simply an examination of friends pushed to the end of their tether, there would be plenty to enjoy. Yet it’s hard to ignore the broken-necked elephant in the room and that adds a different element to any novel.
Foley’s dynamics had potential but she squanders an enticing premise and churns out something more befitting Scooby Doo than Scandi-noir.