The feeling I have carried with me for a decade, now, since it all began. Anyone could be out there, hidden in the blackness, looking in without our knowing.įor a moment the old dark feeling threatens to surface, that sense of being watched. I’m suddenly very aware of how visible we would be from outside, lit up like insects in a jar…or actors on a stage, blinded by the floodlights to the watching audience. Switching to Miranda’s perspective, the prose makes it clear that she’s not completely comfortable in such a remote environment: The narrative then jumps back to three days earlier, when the group first arrived, and then works its way up to the discovery of the body and the aftermath. It’s revealed almost immediately that Doug has found a body on the ground, but we don’t know who has died. Supposedly, the only other people on the property are Heather, the manager, and Doug, the gamekeeper. I think the idea is that it’s meant to blend seamlessly with the still waters of the loch, refelecting the landscape and the uncompromising lines of the big peak, the Munro, rising behind.Īside from Emma and her boyfriend Mark, along for the ride is the beautiful Miranda and her husband Julien Nick and his American boyfriend Bo Samira, her husband Giles, and their baby Priya and Katie, who came without a significant other. According to the photographs the Lodge itself-the “New Lodge,” as the brochure describes it-is a big glass construction, uber-modern, designed by a top architect who recently constructed the summer pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery. It shows a fir-lined loch, heather-red peaks rising behind though they may well be snow-covered now. These folks are lucky if they get one bar of service on their cellphones, and to cap it all, there’s a pending threat of a snowstorm. This year, mousy Emma, a later addition to the group of friends, has arranged a stay at a remote hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands. Getting together every New Year’s is a tradition for a group of Londoners who became close during their Oxford days. When you drop the beleaguered cast in the middle of an unforgiving landscape, it’s even better, and that’s what Lucy Foley does with the poor folks in The Hunting Party.

Kill one, and you’re off to the races! It’s an enduring format, and when it’s done right, it’s quite effective. If you’ve got a set group of people in an isolated setting, you’re good to go. With an impending blizzard on the way, the nostalgia ends abruptly when one of them is murdered.Īnyone that’s read Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is familiar with the locked room mystery. In Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party, a group of old Oxford friends celebrates their annual reunion at a lodge in the remote Scottish Highlands.

The hunting party novel