Hunting for (a) Mystery in THE HUNTING PARTY (2018)

That's the thing about old friends. You just know these things about them. You have learned to love them. This is the glue that binds us together.

The Hunting Party is Lucy Foley's first book, so I'm reading it in reverse order relative to The Midnight Feast from a couple weeks ago. And... I really did not like this one. That surprised me, considering that the elements I didn't like about it were all—okay, maybe they weren't my favourite parts of Midnight Feast either, but I thought they came off better there than they did here. Maybe it's because there was more bonkers supernatural drama in The Midnight Feast. Or maybe The Hunting Party's cast of insufferable rich people are just that much more punchable.

The Hunting Party follows a group of old uni friends, now in their thirties with high-powered jobs, and who don't seem to have much in common anymore except their annual New Year's party. This crew could have been guests at the luxury retreat in Midnight Feast, but instead are staying at a remote, signal-free hotel in the Scottish highlands. A snowstorm is coming in. In this claustrophobic environment, old grudges and patterns start to chafe, and naturally there's a murder. But was it committed by one of the group? Or the serial killer known as the Highland Ripper? The mysterious poacher in the woods? The strange Icelandic couple who are double-booked at the hotel with the protagonists?

Hard to say, when we're not told whose murder has been committed. Like Midnight Feast, Hunting Party is less of a "whodunit" than a "whodunwhat". The narrative hops between snapshots of the present-day murder investigation and the (significantly longer) events leading up to it. I was more irritated by this technique here than I was in Midnight Feast, partly because, rather than just damage control after a fire, there was some real investigating going on from a perfectly-positioned amateur detective: the hotel's manager, Heather. But the narration goes to tortuous lengths to avoid identifying which characters are alive or dead, referring to the friend group as an undifferentiated mass, or having them speak behind walls. In early chapters, you don't even know the victim's gender, and Heather they/thems our corpse in dialogue, like when Conan Edogawa says "The killer could only be— that person!" but more intrusive.

The reason Heather is investigating is her love interest Doug, the gamekeeper. Doug is an ex-marine suffering from PTSD that causes him to go into strangling fugues, so he's the logical fall guy. According to Heather, his dark backstory is "Bad. Very bad." ...which is true, but not in the sense she means. Doug has PTSD because, get this: he didn't shoot an Afghani child "hardly older than a toddler". The (unnamed) child is a suicide bomber, you see, so in not murdering him Doug is responsible for his entire unit being wiped out. Attempting to deconstruct this narrative choice, I would guess that the rationale was that there needed to be a sympathetic reason why a soldier would not shoot someone, or Doug really would be a coward and therefore unlikable. But as it is, it just comes off like a tasteless trolley car problem about whether there's ever a good reason for a professional soldier to execute a civilian infant.

So there was that plot point, which I despised, but my other gripe was with the mystery. This will be getting into spoiler territory, if you consider the victim a spoiler. Also some talk about the ending.

SPOILERS:

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Look, obviously Doug didn't do it. And neither did the Icelandic couple, or the poacher in the woods, or the Highland Ripper. This is a murder mystery, and we expect a motive for the murder, so it's going to be one of the people in the friend group, and the natural victim is Miranda, "the Life and Soul of the party", who everyone had a reason to hate. The women are all psychosexually obsessed with her, and the men are just sexually obsessed with her, apart from the gay couple, who just kind of dislike her for being a bit homophobic, I guess. Miranda receives the classic "You know what? One of these days you're going to go too far." Except it's a good two-thirds of the way through the book. I perked up, hoping a murder was (finally) imminent, but no, Miranda gets another six perspective chapters.

Despite what some books may claim, I don't read mysteries for the suspense and anticipation, and I felt like the hidden-victim structure was doing less to build tension than it was to prevent you from forming any credible theories about who the murderer is. Frankly, if you are paying any attention to this character's actions, it's blindingly obvious, but I couldn't actually say "my theory is that so-and-so killed Miranda because of such-and-such" because it hadn't been confirmed that Miranda was killed.

And again, we don't really see much of the central group after the murder, so you can't really make any observations about their possessions, appearance, behaviour, etc. We are told that "Miranda's death seems to have hit [the murderer], if possible, the hardest of any of us," which would have been a great psychological clue if it wasn't dropped in chapter 58.

To add insult to injury, the murderer essentially gets away with it. This isn't for plot reasons, really, but because "we live in a post-truth world", which I guess would be profound if I had felt like it was a theme in any of the preceding material.

Maybe there's an element of the format just not having been nailed down in this first work, but The Hunting Party just didn't come together for me. The suspense erred on the side of vague, the mystery erred on the side of self-evident, the characters were too awful to each other to be likeable but not awful enough to be camp villains. With friends like these, who needs enemies?