The Hunting Party - Lucy Foley
Nine friends, old Alumni from Oxford, decide to spend New Years at a remote hunting lodge in Scotland in order to escape their lives and "reconnect". But "old friends" aren't as reliable as you would think. A storm traps them up there, alone in the wilderness, and by morning, one of them is dead. When the only suspects are your "closest" friends, who do you trust? Old secrets come to light and new revelations threaten to destroy everything these friends have ever known.
I've finally found my genre of audiobooks and its mystery/suspense. The Hunting Party has had a lot of hype on social media lately and now that I'm commuting a little bit again, I needed something to listen to while still sticking to my reading goals. What better than a suspenseful audiobook? I get most of my audiobooks from online library apps (I don't pay for books unless it's a physical copy I can hold in my hands). The Hunting Party sounded like the perfect book to listen to in order to keep me entranced (I typically don't finish audiobooks, I lose interest fast). This book kept me hooked right to the last word. I'm excited to read more by this author.
The main plot of the story is that nine old friends that met at Oxford decide to spend their New Years together. The newest member of the group, Emma (only a part of the group because her boyfriend is one of the "inner circle") plans everything down to the finest detail in order to impress and maybe, finally, become fully accepted as a full member of the group. They stay at a hunting retreat in the wilderness of Scotland and as soon as they arrive, a storm rolls in, threatening to strand them there over the remainder of their stay. Secrets make the atmosphere tense, and little things start happening to break these friends apart until finally there's a murder. We're left wondering which one was killed, who was the killer, and what possibly could have been the motive to escalate tensions that far in such an old group of friends?
I liked the way the author revealed things in this book. It was quite slow and each realization or discovery came as a shock as you got slowly more into the story. None of the characters are who you first believe them to be and a lot of the events leading up to the main climax itself are shocking in their subtle cruelty. I definitely enjoyed this slow story building style and the backstories to each of the characters. I felt like the writing was pretty immersive as well and the narrators did a fantastic job bringing me into the story. Emma's character/voice actor was my favourite, she was so expressive that she just leapt off the page (or in my case, out of my headphones).
I do have a couple of criticisms, nothing too terrible and I'm probably going to contradict myself a bit as the things I enjoyed are also things that annoyed. As much as I enjoyed the slow build and the shocking reveals, I find when reading a mystery I like to have little hints ahead of time, stuff that gives you that "ahhhhhh" moment when looking back on an event you thought insignificant that happens early on in the book. This book didn't give me that and it was slightly disappointing. It was also a tiny bit annoying not knowing who the victim was for quite some time. I get either not knowing the murderer or not knowing the victim, but not knowing either and then having so many slow-building moments to get there made me want to skip ahead just to know something. But I refrained... it was hard.
All in all, it was a riveting story and I'll definitely be picking up Foley's new book The Guest List as soon as it becomes available on my library app! If you're looking for a good suspenseful read or are trying to get into audiobooks, I highly recommend getting into a mystery or thriller and this is one that will keep you hooked.