The Hunting Party

I came to this one backwards. I had already read The Guest List and liked the way Foley traps a group of people somewhere pretty and lets old history do the damage, so a friend told me to try the earlier book, the New Year one in Scotland. Published in 2018 by HarperCollins, it runs about 406 pages and starts with a body in the snow before rewinding three days. I read most of it on a grey weekend with rain hitting the windows, which felt about right. Cold book, cold weather, no complaints.

What hooked me was not really the puzzle. Foley hides the victim's identity for a long stretch, and honestly that trick worked on me less than the group itself. Nine people who have known each other since Oxford, now pushing thirty, performing friendship while quietly keeping score. I knew people a bit like this at university. Maybe you did too. That recognition kept me turning pages even when I wanted to shake half of them.

The lodge at Loch Corrin

The setting is Loch Corrin Estate, a hunting lodge deep in the Scottish Highlands. Getting there takes a rattling train ride north and then a long drive down roads that shrink as the weather closes in. The lodge itself is handsome in photographs and less forgiving in person. Antlers on walls. A fire that never quite warms the corners. Bedrooms with firm mattresses and thin walls. Outside: a loch gone iron grey, pine forest, mountains that vanish when the snow starts.

Snow matters here the way the storm mattered in The Guest List. It falls heavier each day until the group is properly stuck. Phone signal is a rumor. The nearest help is far away across drifts. Foley takes her time with this. The cold seeps into scenes. Boots left steaming by the door. Everyone drinking too much red wine because the fire is not doing the job. You can feel the trip curdling before anything violent happens, which is the point. The weather does not cause the murder. It just removes every easy exit, so nobody can storm off, cool down, or avoid the people they have been avoiding for years.

The lodge is run by two locals, Heather and Doug. Heather manages the place and does the cooking and the smoothing over. Doug is the gamekeeper, a former soldier who came home carrying things he does not talk about. They live on the estate year round, and their chapters alternate with the guests. At first they read like background color, the weary staff watching rich southerners trash the place. Slowly they become something more. Heather has her own reasons to be afraid of what men with tempers can do. Doug has gaps in his memory that frighten him. Foley uses them as a second lens on the group. The friends see themselves as good fun. Heather and Doug see people who treat staff like furniture and consequences like something that happens to other people.

Nine friends and ten years of baggage

The group has gathered every New Year since their Oxford days. This year Emma organized it, and she is desperate for it to go well. Emma is the newest addition, Mark's girlfriend, and she has never quite been absorbed into the tribe. The others have nicknames for each other, private jokes, rituals. Emma smiles through all of it while feeling every exclusion. I found her the easiest to pity early on. She plans meals, books the lodge, buys the right wine, and gets mocked gently for trying too hard. Trying too hard is the one crime this group never forgives, possibly because they all do it.

Miranda is the center of gravity. Beautiful, loud, funny, the girl everyone wanted to be near at university. She married Julien, a French banker with money and polish, and together they are the golden couple, or so it looks from outside. Inside the marriage there are cracks. Miranda's career never quite became what she expected. Having a baby is not happening easily, and she carries that grief in a loud, joking way that fools nobody. Julien is charming until he is not. He talks about markets and bonuses and treats service staff with a carelessness that tells you plenty.

Then there is Katie, Miranda's oldest friend, going back to school days before Oxford. Katie is a lawyer in the city, capable and respected at work, but inside this group she shrinks back into her old role. Miranda's shadow. The quiet one. She arrives alone, the only single person on the trip, and spends a lot of it watching. Katie knows things about Miranda nobody else knows, and Miranda knows things about Katie. That old intimacy is tangled up with resentment on both sides, the way it gets with friendships that started when you were twelve.

The rest fill out the picture. Giles and Samira are married with a baby daughter, Priya, and parenthood has changed their place in the group. They are tired in a way the others read as boring. Mark is easygoing on the surface and has carried feelings for Miranda far longer than anyone guesses. Nick and his partner Bo round out the nine. Nick has his own history with Miranda, and it is not fond. Years back, at school, Miranda told Nick's parents he was gay before he was ready to tell them himself. She treated it as gossip. He has never forgiven her, though he shows up every New Year anyway. That detail tells you everything about how this group works. People come because not coming would be admitting something broke.

Emma watches, Katie drifts, Miranda performs

Foley rotates the narration among Emma, Miranda and Katie in the days before the killing, with Heather and Doug woven in, plus short flashes forward to the aftermath where police pick through the snow. Because the victim is not named for a long while, every chapter hums with suspicion. Someone will die. Everyone has a reason to hate someone. I spent the first half accusing a different person every forty pages, which I think is exactly the intended effect.

Emma's chapters are the most uncomfortable to sit inside. She notices every slight and replays each one. She describes Miranda's laugh, Miranda's clothes, Miranda's ease with a kind of hunger that goes past admiration. At the time I read it as insecurity, the new girlfriend obsessed with the alpha woman. There are scenes where Emma goes through small rituals to copy Miranda, and they play as sad rather than sinister. Only later do they look different. That recoloring is the book's best move. Foley plays fair with it. The clues are there. I just chose the kinder reading, which is probably what Emma counts on from everyone.

Miranda's chapters surprised me. For someone so hated by some readers, she gets moments of real ache. She knows the group is changing. She knows Julien looks at her differently than he used to. She jokes about babies and jobs and being nearly thirty with a life that looks better in photos. Then she says something cutting to Katie or Emma and you remember why people flinch around her. Foley does not ask you to like Miranda. She asks you to see her as a person who learned early that being the brightest thing in the room keeps people close, and who never learned what to do when the light starts to fail.

Katie interested me most in the middle stretch. She is having a rough year at work, she feels Miranda slipping away, and she starts something reckless with Julien. It begins, in her telling, almost by accident. Two stressed people outside Miranda's orbit for once. Late nights while the others sleep. Long looks across the dinner table that nobody is supposed to catch. Katie tells herself it means nothing and behaves like it means everything. I believed her confusion even as I winced at it. An affair with your oldest friend's husband is hard to forgive on the page, and Foley does not soften it. Katie knows it is wrong while she does it. That does not stop her.

New Year's Eve and the long night

The Eve party starts with everyone trying hard to have fun and ends with everything exposed. There is a lot of drink and some drugs, loud music, dancing, the forced cheer of people who have decided this will be a great night. Underneath, the secrets start surfacing in ugly bursts. Julien's involvement in insider trading comes out, the kind of crime rich men treat as cleverness. Mark's feelings for Miranda spill toward confrontation. Old stories get retold with new bitterness. Miranda, drunk and sharp, says the things sober people only think.

What happens after midnight comes in pieces. Miranda catches Katie and Julien together in the hot tub in the early hours. It is a brutal scene, not played for titillation. Miranda's reaction is shock first, then something colder. The golden couple story cracks open in front of her, and her oldest friend is inside the wreckage. Around the same time, Miranda stumbles on something else. A box of her own belongings in Emma's room. Small things gone missing over the years, going back to Oxford. Notes. Keepsakes. Proof that Emma has been following her, collecting her, shaping herself around her for a decade. The friend who tried too hard turns out to be a stranger who never let go.

Miranda calls Emma what she is, to her face. And Emma, who has built her whole adult life around getting close to Miranda, snaps. She attacks Miranda and chokes her, then pushes her body over the railing of a bridge into the snow below. It is not a clever television murder. It is frantic and physical and sad. By morning there is a corpse half buried in a drift, and the snow keeps falling over it like the place itself wants the whole trip forgotten.

The aftermath chapters move quickly. Police arrive once the weather breaks. The friends turn on each other. And Emma, unwilling to face what she did, fixes the blame in her own head on Katie. If Katie had not slept with Julien, Miranda would never have run out that night, or so Emma's logic goes. Armed and unraveling, Emma goes after Katie back at the lodge. Heather gets between them and is shot for it. Heather lives, which matters, because she is one of the few people in this book I fully rooted for. Emma is arrested. At trial the court hands down manslaughter and four years, a sentence so short it stings. Privilege protects even here, right to the final page.

What lands and what drags

The atmosphere is the best thing in the book. Foley writes cold the way some writers write heat, as a pressure on every scene. The lodge feels real. The snow feels real. The particular misery of being trapped on a group trip that has gone wrong is rendered so well I had to put the book down once and go for a walk. If you like locked room setups where the location is practically a character, this delivers.

The structure works too, mostly. Hiding the victim keeps the first half tense, and the rotating voices mean you see key scenes from two angles. A joke that reads as fun in Miranda's chapter reads as cruelty in Emma's. That doubling is smart. It also means the book trusts you to notice things, which I appreciate. Nobody sits you down and explains the theme. You just watch nine people be awful to each other in ways that feel specific instead of generic.

There are weaknesses and I will not skip them. The middle sags a little. There is a stretch around day two where the chapters start to feel similar. Someone drinks too much. Someone says something cutting. Someone storms to their room. Someone apologizes badly. Repeat with different names. I skimmed a few pages there, which I rarely admit in these writeups but it is true. One more structural complaint. Because the victim stays hidden, some early scenes feel coy rather than mysterious. Foley withholds basic facts, like who is narrating the aftermath sections, in ways that serve suspense more than story. Readers who hate that game will bounce off the first hundred pages.

Character sympathy is uneven by design, but it can still tire you. Almost everyone in the friend group is self absorbed, status anxious, or both. That is realistic for this social set and also wearying across 400 pages. Heather and Doug carry a lot of the warmth, and they are not on the page enough in the middle. If you need someone to love to enjoy a thriller, know going in that this is a book about disliking nearly everyone and reading on anyway. I could do it. Not every reader will.

One small note on the ending. The four year sentence angered some readers I talked to, and it angered me too, but I think that anger is intentional. The book is partly about how certain people glide through consequences. Emma stalked a woman for a decade, killed her, tried to kill again, and gets manslaughter. Compare that with what would happen to Doug, the working class ex soldier, if the same evidence pointed at him. Foley never lectures about this. She just lays the two tracks side by side and lets you feel the difference.

Who should pick it up

Read this if you enjoy group trip thrillers where the horror is social before it is criminal. Fans of Ruth Ware's remote setups or the friend group rot in The Guest List will feel at home. It is also a good pick for a winter read. Snow outside, fire inside, book full of terrible decisions. Just do not expect a cozy mystery or a detective to admire. There is no investigator here worth naming. There is only the group, the staff, the snow, and the slow reveal of what obsession can look like when it wears a friendly face.

I finished it thinking about Miranda more than Emma, which surprised me. The killer gets the reveal. The victim gets the lingering feeling. Miranda was careless with people and paid for it with her life, and those two facts sit next to each other without canceling out. That discomfort is what stayed with me after the final page, more than any of the mechanics.