The Hunting Party

Many of my favorite secluded thriller novels have a high degree of complexity—multiple point-of-view chapters, complex subplots, and morally ambiguous characters. This book had all these elements and a super plus: An immersive and authentic setting in the Scottish Highlands.

I disappeared into the snowbound setting and felt like a part of the group of old friends, caught up in their personal dramas and driven to finish the book to see who did what, when, and why. It was a great escape for me, but not so much for them.

I’ve read several of Lucy Foley’s books, and this one is excellent. She’s a master of the locked room mystery.

This story has all the earmarks of a good, twisty tale: a group of friends with latent and simmering resentments and secrets, a magnificent estate deep in the forested hills of Scotland, a blizzard that has everyone on edge, a groundskeeper with a dark past, and some bizarre strangers thrown into the mix.

This is the type of story I gravitate toward—as backstories are revealed, the tension ramps up until there’s an explosion no one could stop. It’s a whodunit… show more.

I read The Hunting Party on holiday – and was very glad I was on a beach, not in a remote lodge in the Scottish Highlands!

A group of old friends find themselves cut off by a violent blizzard, the perfect conditions for a locked room thriller. The atmosphere is deliciously creepy from the start, and the tension just keeps on building.

Like any good “locked room” murder mystery, the tone of The Hunting Party is insular and claustrophobic. It begins with a group of old friends snowed in at a cabin in the woods in the Scottish Highlands. Not long into the story, one of the friends dies under suspicious circumstances and it’s up to you, the reader, to figure out who among the group is the murderer. I was hooked from beginning to end by this fast-paced, tense tale and, as always, was enthralled by Foley’s sharp prose.