The Hunting Party

Lucy Foley’s novel The Hunting Party is a locked-room mystery set in the remote Scottish Highlands, where a group of old Oxford friends gather to celebrate New Year’s Eve at a secluded estate. The party stays at a lodge on a vast private estate, cut off by snow and far from any town, with only the caretaker couple, Doug and Heather, on hand. The group includes Miranda, the magnetic but self-absorbed center of the circle; her husband Julien; Katie, Miranda’s oldest friend; Emma, a newcomer desperate to belong; the competitive Nick; and Bo, whose girlfriend Samira is the group’s newest outsider. Also present is Iain, the estate’s gamekeeper, whose knowledge of the land and its animals runs through the book. Foley structures the novel through alternating first-person chapters narrated by several of the women, including Emma, Katie, and Heather, the caretaker. The narrative shuttles between the days leading up to New Year’s and the aftermath of the discovery of a body, withholding both the victim’s identity and the killer’s until late in the story. A key device is the prologue’s revelation that someone has died, followed by chapters that flash backward and forward without naming who was killed or who did it. The setting itself functions as a character: the snowbound lodge, the deer stalking, the isolation, and the lurking threat of the wilderness create pressure on old resentments and secrets. The plot turns on the friction between long-held friendships, resentments over past betrayals, and the uneasy presence of newcomers inside a tight clique. The book’s tension comes less from a detective investigation than from the slow exposure of what these people hide from each other.