The Hunting Party

I will start this review with the (perhaps faint) praise that this is a quick read, full of red herrings, and I didn't guess the identity of the killer or the circumstances of the murder until almost the end. The idea of a closed-room style mystery where a group of friends are trapped in a lodge on a snowy peak together might not be the most original - it's the same setup as the video game Until Dawn - but it's got potential.

Unfortunately, it never really lives up to that. I want to save the worst sin for last, so this is just kind of a laundry list of mediocre mystery problems. The POV characters all sound very samey, without unique voices of their own despite their varied backgrounds. Some characters just seemed to kind of be there for no reason, since they didn't have POV chapters and mostly got dunked on by other terrible characters. The Icelandic couple were incredibly off-putting for no real reason; sometimes it almost seemed like they were going to turn out to be werewolves or something. The serial killer subplot (if you can even call it that) was also pretty silly.

There's this weird conversational quality to the prose, sometimes characters will make statements like “I know it's hard to believe” or “are you surprised?” but there's no setup of the book consisting of interviews or diaries or anything so it comes off very strangely. Every instance of writing about a character's mental illness is awkward and embarrassing. Things are sometimes set up to seem like a big deal when they really aren't: one character is constantly making these dark allusions to her old life that she's trying to escape, in which she had seen plenty of dead bodies... later it turns out she used to be a paramedic. And not even a bad or unethical one!

The worst part of the book for me, however, was the absolutely baffling decision to not reveal the identity of the murder victim until almost the end of the book (on my e-reader it was page 306 of 344). It was hard to even try to guess what was going on without knowing who was dead, and the author goes to absurd lengths to conceal this, up to and including a staff member from the lodge asking the train station attendant if he'd seen the missing guest (before they turned up dead) without mentioning said guest's name, gender or appearance! It takes a lot of the fun out of speculating in a whodunnit if you're not fully sure what the ‘it' even is.