Alright, we’re going to do this, it’s time for another book review. Let’s just roll with it. I have no preamble that anyone really wants to hear, so let’s just hop right in.
The Hunting Party is a murder mystery thriller by Lucy Foley published in December of 2018. And let me tell you, I remember exactly when this book came out because I remember seeing it everywhere. EVERYWHERE.
People were posting about it on Instagram on the daily. There were reviews all over. Goodreads was flooded. (Who am I kidding right now, I had already given up using Goodreads at that point.) It was all over. I had even started seeing it before December when people who had ARCs were posting about it, and I remember thinking, damn, this book looks pretty interesting! And that cover! The snow! The stark red against the white! So eye-catching! Let’s put this on the list.
So I put it on my wish list. And to be honest, it just kind of languished there for a little while. It fell by the wayside to other things that I was really excited about it or things that jumped out at me and it just sort of slid to the bottom of the list. And then one day I was at Target stocking up on supplies for lockdown, and I spotted this book on the shelf, now emblazoned with a little “Target Book Club Pick” emblem (what the criteria is for that, I don’t know) and I thought, oh, yeah. I wanted to read that! It’s on the list! And I grabbed a copy.
So for those of you who don’t know, here’s the basic rundown—The Hunting Party follows a group of friends who were all close in college and haven’t seen in each other a while and they all get back together at a fancy lodge in the snowy mountains for a reunion/New Year’s Eve party and wouldn’t ya know it, one of them turns up dead. (Hate it when that happens.) And to double down on the wouldn’t ya know it, the call is coming from inside the house!!! I mean…the killer is one of the other friends.
So. There we go. There is very little in The Hunting Party. It is generous to even refer to them as The Hunting Party. They mostly showed up just to get drunk, eat fancy food, do drugs, and grope each other in various stages of undress, but I guess “The Party Party” is a bit of a stupid title, so. There happens to be one scene where they dutifully take a break from the champagne and pills to follow the local burly Brawny paper towel man stereotypical “I’ve seen some dark things, man” groundskeeper of The Lodge through the woods on a little deer stalking excursion as part of their woodsy vacation package. And then promptly return to partying.
It’s a bit of a slow starter as we kind of painstakingly get to know everyone in the friend group, all of whom still kind of blur together for me, because all of them except maybe one just seem like spoiled rich kids who loved to party who grew up into spoiled rich adults who still love to party and to be honest, it took me until like 50 pages in to start even being able to distinguish between them. The narrators themselves admit that many of the females in the group, especially, are very much alike—some of them intentionally.
We switch POVs a lot, which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but I can’t say I really enjoyed it here. We switch between five points of view which almost seem to be chosen at random and in some ways, also kind of spoil the story. One POV is in the present, after the murder has happened, and four of them are in the past, before the murder has happened. So there’s a lot of jumping around happening and some of the jumping around seems a little pointless.
Look, here’s the thing about this book—it’s not bad. It’s not. But in my opinion, it’s not good either. It’s just not…much of anything. It’s just…meh. It’s like one of those cheesy Lifetime murder mystery movies. It’s something to do. It passes a little time. But it’s not that good, and it’s not very memorable. A year from now, you could ask me about this book, and I will probably not remember much, if anything, about it. Just like a Lifetime movie. You watch and then that quickly your brain is like “eh, this isn’t vital, get rid of it. We need room for random trivia about otters, like the fact that they enjoy juggling rocks.”
You could probably even ask me who the killer ended up being and I’d be like, “Eh, I don’t know, one of the girls, maybe? I think?”
The other problem is, every character in this book is just…just awful. So I really couldn’t get that invested, because I honestly didn’t care what happened to any of them. You spend most of the book trying to guess which one of them got murdered and who did it with several really obvious red herrings and false starts, but I really stopped caring which one of them bit the big one because I didn’t like any of them. Toward the end, we transition into an epilogue type chapter and I didn’t even care where any of them ended up. They’re just…there was no one even remotely likable. Not even likable in a villainous way.
So, to wrap things up here…not that bad, not that great. Star rating, I’d give it a two and a half out of five stars – right in the middle for a right in the middle book. I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend this to anyone, and it didn’t inspire me to seek out any of her other books, the latest of which is currently all over social media. (And is about—wait for it—a group of friends who all get together for a special occasion and ONE OF THEM TURNS UP DEAD.)
Sorry this wasn’t a holy crap hit it out of the park read this right away type review—I’ll try to find something to rave about next time.
Stay safe and stay sane!