The Hunting Party

9 loathsome friends with more money than sense take a trip to the highlands of Scotland to celebrate New Years Eve. There's a psychopath in their midst but who is it? The story is told through the eyes of three of the friends and two of the people who work at the lodge. The more you find out the more awful the characters become so much so that when someone dies you really don't care in fact you are rooting for the killer. This was a 2 star book all the way though but reveal of the stalker got an extra star and that was the best part of this book, the rest of it really does go on and on and on and on and on.

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, however I found the attribution of the killer's actions and motivations to their mental health diagnosis (which was all but outright stated, and which I happen to share) to be somewhat problematic and stigmatising. I have knocked a star off for this, however do keep in mind that because I share the diagnosis, I am a little biased! I did predict the main twists as well, which doesn't help the rating. But overall, a good read and one I don't regret.

3.5 Liked this one better than The Guest List. The audio was well done, with different actors for each narrator. The last hour contained all the twists in a flurry, but overall a fun diversion.

This book was a disappointment for me, unfortunately. After reading and loving The Guest List, I was excited to read this one by the same author. The premise is quite similar, so I was hoping for another thrilling read. However, it just doesn't deliver.

The story follows a group of friends who always get together for New Years. This year, Emma, a newer member of the group, has planned their trip to a remote lodge in the snowy Scottish Highlands. As the holiday progresses, old grudges come to the surface and things get tense. When one person from the group goes missing, the people running the lodge begin a frantic search during a snowstorm. When a body is found, no one knows who can be trusted anymore.

The characters in this book are quite annoying, which makes it hard for the reader to get invested in their outcomes. The group of friends are mostly vain and privileged. Their “problems” seem petty. The “victim” is extremely unlikable, which makes it hard to care much about finding the murderer. Even though the narrator does not reveal who the victim is through much of the story, it is easy to predict which one it is. The groundskeepers are a bit more likable, but they do not contribute much to the story. The side plot connected to them in the end seems a bit unnecessary also.

The plot is not as suspenseful as I would have liked it to be. The behavior of the characters is pretty predictable, and I had pretty much figured out who the murderer would be early on in the storyline.

Overall, this one just falls short for me. I found it to be predictable, and it just did not hold my interest the way her other book did.

Loved this one. Very Agatha- finite group of suspects trapped in snowy hellscape. One dead, lots of motives. I love the different narrators. highly recommend this read.

Emma shoots someone in front of multiple witnesses including the police and doesn't get convicted for it. Lazy ending.

Follows the same formula as The Guest List, which I read first and preferred. This one just didn't catch my interest. The characters were all so unlikeable I had a hard time caring who got murdered and who did it.

Slow burn for the first half of the book. Too similar to the author's previous novel, but without the same spark.

Rating: 4.3 leaves out of 5
Characters: 5/5
Cover: 3/5
Story: 4.5/5
Writing: 4.5/5
Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Fiction
Type: Audiobook
Worth?: Yes!

If you like the edge of your seat kind stories I believe this one may be for you. The thrill of who died and who done it had me continuing the story eagerly. I really did like the characters this author decided to bring forth to the forefront. Miranda, Katie, Emma, Doug, and Heather.

Miranda: A snot nose rich evil brat. That is the best that I could describe her.

Katie: Girl in Miranda's shadow. I was listening to the audio so at first, I wasn't sure what kind of person Katie was. I thought she was badass single lady who needed no man... I was kinda wrong about that. Lol.

Emma: An annoying wanna-be. Dear lord, I just wanted to punt her back into her mother's womb.

Doug: I want that man. That is all. All kinds of manly, mysterious, and troubled past.

Heather: She is an ANGEL. She had a sad past but she wooo I want her too. Doug, her, and I.

There are more in the group that doesn't get their own voice. Mark, Julien, Nick, Bo, Samira, and Giles. To be honest it was a lot of people to keep track of. It took me more almost halfway into the book to figure out who was who.

Mark: Emma's boyfriend. Man has his own problems and not in a good way.

Julien: Rich narcissistic prick. He is literally the dumb male version of Miranda. Also Miranda's husband.

Nick: I didn't think he was really problematic. He is gay and dating Bo, who is also unproblematic. Those two were really kind of fresh air in this whole thing.

Samira: Once a wild child, she is now settled with Giles and they have a kid together.

Giles: We know so little of this guy. 1. He is Samira's husband and baby daddy. 2. His past job. (All I can say since it will be a spoiler.) That is literally it.

The only reason why I didn't give it 5 stars is because of all the characters. I love Nick and Bo, but they really didn't have a place in the story except for... maybe a couple of things? They were there for a bit of back story, but honestly too many characters crowd a story.

To be honest, I wish there was more going on with Doug and Heather... they seem pretty cute together.

This book was really good! I love a good Agatha Christie and this was a modern take on that. I saw some people say they guessed the twists but maybe I'm just naive and didn't at all, so it was a total surprise for me. I love that each chapter is from a different person's perspective so you really get to see how everyone truly feels about each other and makes it hard to guess who was killed and who was the killer.

70% книги я была уверена, что где-то читала эту историю, видела этих персонажей. Я даже помню где - у Яны Вагнер, в романе “Кто не спрятался”. Просто удивительная схожесть - группа друзей в заснеженных горах, у всех свои тайны и каждый - хотя в это непросто поверить - мог бы решиться на убийство. Даже эта таинственность вокруг жертвы - автор как могла сохраняла в тайне личность погибшего, как и Яна Вагнер.
От этого, все же, менее интереснее не стало - после половины книги узнаваемость сюжета отошла на второй план, на первый выполз сам сюжет. Плюс несколько деталей... Словом, получился крепкий детектив с претензией на психологичность. Однако не могу не признать, что у Яны Вагнер герои вышли поярче - но зато менее лаконичными, а в деле детектива отсутствие лаконичности скорее минус. Атмосфера сохранена, это тоже немаловажно.

The Hunting Party, ultimately, was okay. I liked the pace and the setting, but not so much the characters. The writing was decent, but not impressive. Most of all I was not a fan of the format: the point of view changes every few pages, it jumps back and forth in time, and some of the chapters are written in first person while others are in third. WHY? It really felt like they were arbitrary choices and lended nothing to the mystery.

Also, this book (like so many others) was compared to the Golden Age of mystery in the description. I really have to stop falling for that. Aside from being a “closed room” mystery, which is by no means exclusive to the Golden Age, it has little in common with mysteries of that period. I was disappointed.

4 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thoroughly enjoyed it. Several repetitions that stopped me from giving it a 5 star but enjoyable nonetheless.
Definitely had me suspecting anyone and everyone. I loved the switch of “that's who it is, no this person has got to be the one!”.

Recensie van audioboek (via Storytel)Een interessant opgebouwd mysterie, in een heel sfeervolle locatie met personages die je graag haat, maar met een ietwat anticlimactisch einde.Ook, achteraf gezien, haar meest recente boek [b:The Guest List 51933429 The Guest List Lucy Foley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1580194251l/51933429.SY75.jpg 73094861] volgt echt wel bijna volledig dezelfde blauwdruk.

3.25 stars

Novel is definitely a slow burn. The pace didn't pick up until the last 100 pages. However, I didn't see the twists coming. The ending could have been flushed out more.

2.5 stars. A mild spoiler. I wasn't bored for most of this book until the end. The characters are all awful people. The writing is just okay. The characterizations are also just okay. There are a million red herrings, and just when I wanted to second guess myself, my basic hunch was proven right in the end. I started to give the book more credit than it deserved, but the end was a thing I've seen done before. Badly, and in better written books.

I'm so over the psychopath villain stalker. I'm over the fat girl obsessing about pretty people. I'm over books that don't seem to really get friendship. Do I need another female frenemy thriller in my life? No. Nope. I'm over all those things. Can someone please write a thriller that's actually not asinine? Like, seriously, thrillers are the worst sometimes. And I mostly had fun reading this. But, like nearly all thrillers I've read, the ending just kills me. And is it too much to ask to be able to like someone in the story?

Actually, I did like someone. The only character I liked was Miranda herself.

Very confused as to why all of the female POVs were written in first person, and the one male POV (Doug) was written in third? It really disrupted the flow of the novel for me, and left me scratching my head each time it happened.

Mostly a perfectly fine suspense snack book, but way too much emphasis on normative ideas of attractiveness, in an extremely redundant and generally disappointing/boring way. Also the characterization of one person really relied on the “conventionally pretty mean girl” trope in a way that tried and failed to be self aware about it but ended up just reinforcing it. Probably wouldn't recommend if you can't handle the sexism.

*3.5 stars. Predictable popcorn fun.

Sólidos 3,5 pra esse suspense que eu já queria ler há meses. Surpreendente e com boa construção de personagens, achei.

Good way to pass time

I would give this a two for quality and depth of characters but a four for being a good quarantine read.

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.

Oh, it all ended neatly packaged in a cute little bow, but it was fun and kept me on my toes. I do so love a ‘locked room' mystery.