The Hunting Party

As far as modern "mystery" novels go, The Hunting Party might be the most enjoyable one I've read. I think it's because the book doesn't actually focus on the crime itself, but the relationship between the various parties involved. So rather than concentrating on something that is often disappointing in modern "mysteries," it focuses on an element that Foley can apparently do well.

A large part of The Hunting Party's appeal comes from its unique structure. The book is about nine friends from college taking a New Year's vacation together to a lodge by a Scottish loch. Naturally, one of them ends up dead. The book consists of two parallel storylines: one that begins on December 30, the first day of the trip, and the other that begins on the day the corpse is discovered after New Years. Each side is presented chronologically, but the book constantly jumps between the two. In other words, we're simultaneously shown, bit by bit, both the events leading up to and the aftermath of the murder. The viewpoint character also changes every chapter. It's a bit confusing at first, but not so much once you've learned the cast.

This might sound like a traditional whodunit—you have a predefined group of people in an isolated setting where a murder occurs—but it's not. You see, the book reveals neither the murderer nor the victim until the end. At first it was kind of annoying how the post-murder chapters seemed to keep on pushing back the victim reveal to the next chapter, but once I realized and accepted that the victim's identity probably wouldn't be disclosed until the end, it was actually kind of funny seeing how far out of its way the book went to avoid specifying the victim. Naturally, since The Hunting Party refuses to name its victim, there can be no examination of things like alibis or motives. As I said, the book doesn't focus on the crime itself, but the characters.

While the victim is supposed to be a surprise, the book strongly suggests a certain character will be the victim as it wears on. The story makes sure to never commit itself outright, so I thought that perhaps Foley was trying to make us thinking that this character was the victim in order to surprise us by killing off someone else... but nope, the most obvious victim candidate ended up being the one who indeed dies.

There are a few other characters besides the main group of nine friends (two lodge employees and two other guests), but the nine friends are the main focus. And they're all obnoxious. But the joy of the novel is in watching the lives and relationships of these privileged jerks, who have somehow maintained the façade of friendship for years while constantly hurting and attacking each other, fall apart. Most people enjoy drama and gossip, and the fact that these are fictional people with no impact on your actual life and no real tragedy just makes it easier to revel in.

However, in a sense I think that almost made the murderer and victim arbitrary. There is so much bad blood among the friendship circle that you could probably come up with a motive for every single possible murderer-victim pair. When everyone has a motive to kill everyone else, there's no murderer-victim pair the book can present that will be surprising. The actual solution was one of my top theories, but I had no way to tell that the solution, and not one of the other tantalizing murderer-victim pairs, was the solution.

There's also an incredibly strong strain of millennial angst pervasive throughout the story. After all, it centers around a group of college friends who are desperately trying to preserve their past relationship even as their new lives and obligations try to pull them apart. As loathe as I am to admit it, I can relate. And I'm not saying anything else about this because it'll just make me sad and sentimental, and there's no reason to be sad and sentimental because I'm still hip and cool and still got it, right? Right??

While it was fun watching the "friends" hurt each other, the pair of lodge employees (who are each viewpoint characters) were obnoxious in a totally different way. Each of them is working in this isolated Scottish lodge in order to escape their dark, tragic past, and each of them has feelings for the other, but is too chicken to act on their feelings because they just know that they'd be rejected if the other one knew of their dark, tragic past. It's trite, and it'd be bad enough to have one character like that, but to have two characters act like this towards each other while following both of them shot right past "dramatic irony" into "unbearable annoyance."

So The Hunting Party isn't a detective story, but it never really pretends to be one, which made it relatively enjoyable. At one point near the end it looks like it's going to both break the central promise of its premise and use the most cliched resolution possible, but the book fortunately avoids that. Also, with all these horrible people acting horrible towards each other over the course of the book and having their relationships finally come to a head it feels like they should finally get what they deserve, but... they don't. None of them (except the victim) really suffer any lasting repercussions for what they do. There's one character in particular who does something extraordinarily illegal with multiple witnesses who doesn't even seem to get charged. So while it is a fun ride, the fact that none of the jerks (besides the victim) get their comeuppance ends up voiding the experience a bit.