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 retre...

"Keeping people away from the land—from their land—like this, it's evil. It's a kind of murder." The distinction between a murder mystery and a psychological thriller is a matter of some debate —certainly there are many psychological thrillers featuring a murder, and many tense mystery novels rooted in the psyche. But I'd like to propose a metric that I'll call the Copacabana Rule, after the melodramatic climax of the Barry Manilow song : "There was blood and a single gun shot— But just who shot who?" That is to say that if, rather than elements like motive, means, or murder weapons, the central mystery is suspense over which character is going to get axed (or indeed, if there was any murder at all), then you are firmly in psychological thriller territory. The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley passes the Copacabana test. There are four-ish corpses, and in my eBook, which displayed as having 492 pages, the first victim is identified on page 368, 75%...