I found this to be very much like an old style crime thriller. I mean that in a good way. Very atmospheric it is set in an out of the way location as in the Scottish Highlands cut off by snow. The plot thickens so to speak.
A group of friends eaten up by secrets and tension alongside some other very sinister guests and then of course a death. The staff are definitely a bit troubled and some of the characters are quite unlikeable.
Full of unexpected twists and red herrings as you would expect. Enjoyable and intelligent writing reminiscent of Agatha Christie

I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy this book as it’s different to my usual read but I gave it a chance cow and my god am I glad!! What a story! Very well written with amazing i ndepth characters and great descriptions I love it! I don’t want to give too much away but it kept me interested and up till 2am reading it! Would defo recommend

A great book and this isn't one I would normally read. I usually read chic lit but this changed my view on other genres.
A group of people are in a small area cut off by snow. Sinister people and troubled staff. It all ends in murder.....
This is all about the twist and revelations. Very entertaining.

I thought this was a very good example of its genre, it is an Agatha Christie style murder mystery. The characters rang true and the way the plot unfolded kept me guessing. I had no idea who had been murdered and it was impossible to guess by who, While I am not fond of "shoot-out" type of denouements, this was forgivable. After the build-up I was slightly disappointed by the ending, I expected something a little more surprising. The epilogue wrapped it all up nicely.

Wow this book was so different to anything Ive ever read before, despite being in the genus of books I always read. I wasn't too sure due to this but I am so glad I stuck with it, it was so different and kept me gripped to the last page without any of the often present predictability. I will be looking out for more by Lucy! Many thanks

This one had me up to the early hours until I finished it! Gripping, twisty, atmospheric.....I thought the dynamics between the friendship group was really well drawn and there was a convincing and compelling sense of place in the remote setting. Occasionally, I felt the first person narratives weren't quite distinct enough but I was willing to forgive this for such an enthralling plot. Great stuff for thriller fans.

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley was a highland who done it with twists and turns like a Scottish highland track. A bunch of mates, well so called mates , desend upon a country lodge to celebrate new year. One thing leads to another and one of them is killed.....but by who! This was a great read with a miriad of characters all with their own baggage and history. Great read and well laid out. If you like a who did right up to the very last minute it then this is for you.

This was such a good book! A multiple character viewpoint that moves back and forth between the time before and after a murder has occurred. This is all done so skilfully that you don't know who the victim or the murder is until the last few pages.

Thanks Netgalley and the Publisher. Really liked this book a bit like Agatha Christie in todays world. Good old fashioned mystery book

I feel like there's a lot of books right now which are focusing on a group of people being trapped in a remote location and then someone turns up dead. So I wasn't going into this with high hopes. However, I really liked this book. I liked the flipping backwards and forwards between the present (when the body has been found), and the past (from the moment the group arrives leading up to what happens), and I also liked that you don't fully know who's being killed until quite a while into the book. It was so fun trying to work out who it could be, and who could have killed them.

The main characters were nasty and awful people, and I loved it. There were so much drama between them, and that helped build the tension. However, I feel like two of the couples in the friendship group were in the background and if you cut them out of the book altogether, it would have no impact on the plot. Those couples being Samira and Giles, and Nick and Bo. Why were they there??

I didn't see the ending coming. There were lots of little twists towards the end and I loved them. Just really loved this book. Would love to read more from this author!

This book follows a group of Oxford graduates as they reunite for their annual New Year holiday.

As the year has progressed, their lives and the order of such have stretched them further and further apart, but there is the glimmer of hope that these yearly holidays will reconnect them to the reasons they became friends all those years before...

Until somebody is murdered in the snowy highlands so chosen for peace and tranquility...

This books follows multiple POV as we trace the unassuming events leading up to the murder and the events there after. This provides a rich narrative, with a multitude of twists and turns that left me on the edge of my seat. It is an excellently constructed novel, with this somewhat erratic switch between characters fitting to the unsettled landscape that quickly turned from heaven to hell...

A thriller set in a remote Scottish hunting lodge.

Nine friends from University meet to spend the New Year together. It starts as a happy occasion but quickly old emotions and rivalries emerge, and the reunion starts to fall apart.

Then a body is found.

Emma, who has organised the holiday and chosen the venue, is something of an outsider, having only married into the group two years previously. The other eight were all at Oxford ten years before, and in this tight-knit set of friends, there are four couples and Katie, single, but a successful lawyer. Miranda is the star of the show, very beautiful, well connected, dazzlingly social and outwardly appears to have a perfect life. But does she? She has the capacity to stir things up and upset people. She starts playing a dangerous game.

The group of friends set out determined to have a great time, but the enjoyment, fuelled by alcohol, soon begins to reveal the cracks in their toxic relationships. Things deteriorate quickly, and then one of them disappears and the body, when it is found, shows evidence of murder.

The remote setting in the Scottish wilderness, which is described in great detail, adds to the tense atmosphere.

The narrative is told by various members of the party and the two members of staff at the hunting lodge. The action darts backwards and forwards over three days, giving it heightened tension and keeps the pages turning. Although this is a well-written and certainly compelling book to read, the hunting party, on the whole, is a self-centred and unpleasant bunch of people, while the two staff who run the place are both depressed and dysfunctional. This is the one drawback. The reader wants to find out the victim and the killer – and there are plenty of twists – but in the end, it doesn’t seem to matter who survives and who doesn’t.

A good murder mystery, which keeps you guessing right to the end.

Jane

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

Thank you to Netgalley, Lucy Foley & Harper Collins for my arc of The Hunting Party.

Ever since they graduated Oxford together, a group of friends have found the time to take a holiday together every new year, and 2017 is no different. Samira and Giles have a baby now; Priya, Julien and Miranda are hiding secrets, Emma is nervous because as Mark's girlfriend she's still fairly new to the group and is the one who arranged this year's trip, Nick and Bo are excited but sick of Mark's homophobic jokes, and Katie is the only Singleton and feeling somewhat left out.

The Lodge is a lonely, if beautiful place, surrounded by forests and mountains, deer to be hunted and complete with a surly gamekeeper with a dangerous past, and a housekeeper running away from hers. Not to mention the creepy Icelandic couple staying in the boiler house.

The story is told from 5 POV's; Emma, Katie, Miranda, Doug (the gamekeeper) and Heather (the housekeeper). The three female guests have a POV in the past leading up to New Year's Day while Doug and Heather are in the future after the murder is committed and occasionally going back to the past to report what they saw of the group with an outside view. The reader finds out almost immediately that there has been a death but in a clever twist, we don't know who it is until very near to the end.

I found the story pulled me in right from the off. It takes a good writer to be able to manage so many different povs, and make them complement the story rather than confusing it, and Lucy Foley pulled this off. It was interesting to see how the different people perceived each other compared to how they thought they were being perceived. The ending was certainly a shock as well. I'd kind of figured out who the victim was, but I was almost at the big reveal before I figured out the murderer. Excellent writing, I'll be looking out for more from this author in the future!

A group of friends retreat to a quiet hunting lodge for the new year. Each chapter is narrated from a different character going back and forth in time and then leading up and after the moment one of them is murdered. It follows in the vein of a true murder mystery where we are aware a murder has happened but we don't know who is dead and who did, with one who is killed still speaking. I think I would've enjoyed this much more if the characters were more bearable to read about. The voices of each character were actually difficult to distinguish since they're so similar. I rarely step out into mysteries and it's a shame that I didn't enjoy this as much I wanted to.

When a group of old Oxford friends get together for their yearly new Year’s Eve bash, one person ends up dead. Rewind two days, and it’s clear there’s a lot of cracks in the group and people don’t like each other as much as they pretend. But who is the killer, and who is the victim?

The Hunting Party was a great debut thriller, and it honestly made me excited for other books Lucy Foley will write as she has great potential for brilliant, gripping books.

I really liked this book, and the intrigue of figuring out the dynamic of the group of people. Honestly, they were all bunch of d***heads but reading their antics was kind of like watching wild animals, it was hard to pull my attention away from the crazy antics.

There were a lot of names thrown out in the beginning chapters of this book and it took me a while to figure out who was who, and I also kept forgetting whose POV I was following (Katie, Emma, Miranda or Heather) as sometimes they sounded a bit similar and one would just run into another and I’d have to flip back to remind myself who I was reading.

A page-turning thriller with big-screen adaptation potential. Far from the best-written novel out there - Foley's clunky foreshadowing is tiresome (hey, everyone's a suspect!) and her characters are flat as pancakes, although her deft weaving of the plot's then-and-now structure goes some way towards mitigating this and propels the reader through the novel. Bound to be hugely popular, just not one for me.

Atmospheric and intriguing, this is a whodunnit with a difference as we don’t find out the victim or the guilty party until near the end of the book.

Instead we meet a group of uni friends and their partners as they gather for their annual get together, which, as the years have drifted on, shows how their friendships have also drifted.

Not many likeable characters in this book, but that’s part of the appeal. I enjoyed it and the way it was plotted immensely.

I enjoyed this book very much, loved the cast of friends and the other characters. Also the idea that we don’t know who is in trouble at the beginning. Lots of interesting facts come out about everyone involved, great plot. Keeps you guessing.

Lots of people still have friends from school or university. These people who've known you for years, who have seen you at your worst and most embarrassing moments, can sometimes be friends for life, your shared experiences providing the basis for a strong friendship. But sometimes there's not as much keeping you together as you think. The friends in The Hunting Party met at Oxford and reunite every New Year for a blow-out party. This year their party takes them to the Scottish Highlands, portrayed in this book as a beautiful but harsh wilderness. And it's not just a stag who gets killed this time...

Drawing definite inspiration from Agatha Christie the story unfolds in alternating chapters by different members of the group and switching time lines, and the strange events of the party soon emerge. This was a good fun read, with lots of characters you'll love to hate, and lots of red herrings along the way.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Strange but good... Who would have thought a New Years trip to the Scottish highlands would have caused so much drama.
Well worth reading.