The Hunting Party

September 1, 2018

In her first crime novel, Foley (The Invitation) takes a group of thirtyish Oxford graduates who celebrate New Year's Eve together to a dreamily remote estate in the Scottish Highlands. They're snowed in by a blizzard of historic proportions, and by New Year's one of them lies dead. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2018
Ever since college, these nine friends have remained close. This year, only eight of them will go home from their New Years' party.While Miranda and Katie are childhood friends and bonded with Julien, Mark, Samira, Giles, Nick, and Bo while they were at Oxford or soon after, Emma didn't become part of the group until she married Mark just a few years ago. For that reason, she has gone all out to plan this year's New Year's gathering at a remote Scottish hunting lodge. "Very exclusive," she reports. "They only let four parties stay there each year." She's had the place stocked with truffles, foie gras, and other delicacies, and Miranda and Julien have brought a case of Dom Pérignon. As we turn the first page of Foley's (The Invitation, 2016, etc.) debut thriller after several historical novels, it is Jan. 2, 2019. Heather, the manager of Loch Corrin, receives a breathless visit from Doug, the rough-hewn and scary/sexy gamekeeper. He has found the body of the missing guest. We won't know which guest that is, of course, for quite some time. The tense tale of this ill-fated reunion is told in flashbacks from several different characters' perspectives, each with a different angle and a different dark secret in his or her past, as is classic in this form of the whodunit. It seems likely that the killer comes from the ranks of the guests--there's a good bit of interpersonal tension, much of it generated by the extreme gorgeousness of Miranda, the queen bee of the crowd. Her relationship with her husband, Julien, is surely not the bed of roses the others believe, and her so-called best friend, Katie, seems to hate her guts. On the other hand, there's mention of a serial killer on the loose in the Highlands, so who's that sneaking around in the woods?Plot, reasonably clever. Setting, nicely done. Characters, two-dimensional stereotypes, but you can't have everything.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 15, 2018
A group of London friends arrive at exclusive Loch Corrin in the Scottish Highlands for a New Year's get-together and find the location a bit too remote?it's a mile to the main road, Wi-Fi is unreliable, and, when they get snowed in, things turn frightening. A prologue reveals that a guest has been found dead, and the ensuing chapters switch back and forth between the days leading up to the death and those just after, all the while uncovering the friends' past misdeeds and entanglements. Anyone who's grown apart from old friends will recognize the yearning depicted here to make everything as it was; Foley (The Book of Lost and Found, 2015) tempers the sentimentality with the guests' efforts to best one another and the social clash between them and the workers at the lodge. Readers are left wondering until the end which guest has died as well as who the killer is; they will be well rewarded by the story's ending. A great read-alike for this is Shari Lapena's recent An Unwanted Guest (2018).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)