The Hunting Party Review
Author: Lucy Foley
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Publication Date: 24 January 2019
Source: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 394
Rating: DNF (@page 203)
Goodreads Synopsis:
Everyone's invited...everyone's a suspect...
For fans of Ruth Ware and Tana French, a shivery, atmospheric, page-turning novel of psychological suspense in the tradition of Agatha Christie, in which a group of old college friends are snowed in at a hunting lodge . . . and murder and mayhem ensue.
All of them are friends. One of them is a killer.
During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they’ve chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands—the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves.
They arrive on December 30th, just before a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world.
Two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead.
The trip began innocently enough: admiring the stunning if foreboding scenery, champagne in front of a crackling fire, and reminiscences about the past. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group’s tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year’s Eve, the cord holding them together snaps.
Now one of them is dead . . . and another of them did it.
Keep your friends close, the old adage goes. But just how close is too close?
Book Review:
Pre-reading Thoughts:
This book sounds so good. I mean a murder among friends. I have to say that this has got me very intrigued by this book. I cannot wait to see who is murdered and who murdered! I feel like this is going to be one of those books that keep me on the edge of my seat!
Thank you so much to Jonathan Ball Publishers for providing me with a copy of this book! Jut a quick disclaimer for those reading this review, I have received this book for free. Please note that this does not affect my opinions in any way. All thoughts are my own.
Writing Thoughts:
I was not the biggest fan of the writing from the get-go. It lacked flow and was inconsistent when it came to the amount of detail that was included. I found that the sentences seemed to run forever and made the book quite heavy to read. I did, however, enjoy the atmosphere created by the setting. The isolating image of a lodge in the middle of winter made for a spooky setting.
Plot Thoughts:
The plot was so slow. I read more than half of this book and personally, I found that not much happened. I felt as if there was just a lot of repetition with both the comments and the flashbacks. I can't really comment on a lot because I did not finish the book but I found that the mystery of both the murderer and the victim was drawn out too long. At the point where I dnfed the book, I was hoping that the victim would have been revealed however at that point only the gender was revealed and that made me so mad.
Character Thoughts:
I did not connect to any of these characters. They felt super pretentious and were just constantly bitching about the past. Whilst this is a super realistic approach to friendship dynamics, I was not interested in what made each person great before this event. I also found that whilst we did get a look at who each character was, I still found them underdeveloped. I wanted more when it came to the characters especially considering that it is supposed to be character-driven.
Final Thoughts:
Overall, I was actually pretty disappointed by this book. It wasn't what I was expecting at all. The writing was too inconsistent but it did create the perfect setting. I also think that my biggest disappointment was that I was expecting it to be fast-paced but the plot is so slow. It took forever for anything to happen and even when something did happen, it wasn't enough to keep the momentum. The characters threw me off because it honestly seemed like this was a whole who did it better, who has it better and so on. At the end of the day, I just wanted more. There was not enough of the right elements to keep me going and I thought that the pacing of the whole novel was completely off.
Yours In Reading,
Melleny
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