Review: The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
I read this book in basically one obsessive swoop. It has most of my very favorite mystery tropes and some of my favorite tropes in general. I specifically love the way Foley uses character archetypes so incredibly deftly.
The Hunting Party follows a group of friends on a three or four-day New Years' trip to a remote lodge in Scotland.
I really love the way Foley uses character tropes as both a quick way to provide characterization and to
play with reader expectations of how the book is going to unfold. She is engaging in this really fascinating game with the reader playing the expectations of each character archetype against the reader at times. I find this incredibly engaging and it really keeps the pace of the story very fast, even in the earliest chapters.
I love the way Foley writes plot reveals. I am always delighted by them. She does an excellent job giving the reader enough information to begin putting clues together before the characters do. I really love the balance of how many things were easy for the reader to guess and how many were more obfuscated. I was very happy to have guessed two of the really big reveals pretty early in the book, but Foley had plenty of red herrings to make me second guess myself while I was reading. Even when I was sure I knew what was coming, I was still really excited to see how the other characters were going to finally figure it out with me.
One aspect of the book I didn't love was that the killer was someone with a mental illness. I don' think that Foley wrote the most harmful version of this trope, but I do think this is a trope that perpetuates untrue assumptions about folks with mental illness, especially things like borderline personality disorder or 'antisocial' disorders in general. These people are far more likely to be the victim of violent crime, but in fiction, they are very often the perpetrator.
I always love a book about obsessive friendships, it is just one of my absolute favorite themes to be explored. I loved seeing these relationships slowly unfold, and get to see the different ways these people were connected and how these relationships became more and more complicated over time.
I generally found this book compulsively readable. I read it is one day, finishing it pretty late that night because I was not going to be able to go to sleep until I finished the story. I will continue to read Lucy Foley and am really excited to pick up her most recent book.
I gave this book four stars.
