Ten hours of rich, privileged people being terrible to each other in a Scottish hunting lodge, and somehow I kept listening.
I picked this one up on a Saturday morning when Carlos took the kids to his mom's and I had the house to myself after a brutal stretch of nights. Made a pot of coffee, started cleaning the kitchen, and figured I'd let some fictional murder distract me from the real trauma I'd been charting all week. And it did. Mostly.
Everybody's Awful and I Couldn't Look Away
Here's the thing about The Hunting Party - Lucy Foley wrote a cast of characters who are almost universally unlikable, and she did it on purpose. The golden couple with their performative perfection. The volatile friend who drinks too much and says the quiet parts loud. The outsider who doesn't belong and knows it. These are people I'd avoid at a party. But stuck in a remote lodge during a blizzard with a dead body? I'm invested.
The structure hops between perspectives and timelines - the days leading up to New Year's Eve and the aftermath of the murder discovery. Each narrator represents a different character's point of view, and Foley is smart about parceling out information. You get these little cliffhanger endings at the end of each section that made me scrub the counter harder just to have something to do with my hands. Who's the victim? Who did it? Why does everyone have a secret? Classic locked-room setup.
But I'll be honest - the first 70% is slow. Like, IV-drip slow. There's a LOT of backstory about university friendships and old grudges and who slept with whom a decade ago. I kept waiting for the actual thriller part to kick in, and when it finally did, the reveals felt... expected. I called the killer around hour six. Not because I'm some genius - the breadcrumbs were just a little too obvious. The ending didn't land with the punch I needed. It was like building to a code blue and then finding out the patient just had gas.
Five Narrators Walk Into a Lodge
The multi-narrator format is genuinely the best reason to do this as an audiobook rather than print. Five narrators - Cathleen McCarron, Clare Corbett, Ellie Heydon, Joshua Manning, and Laura Kirman - each take on different characters' chapters, and it makes the perspective shifts crystal clear. When you're juggling this many timelines and viewpoints, having distinct voices is the difference between following the story and rewinding every ten minutes.
The women carry the heavy lifting here. Each brings a different energy to her character - you can hear the anxiety in one, the barely-contained rage in another. It works. The weak link is the male performance for Doug, which lands flat and monotonous. In a book where every character is supposed to be hiding something, a droll delivery undercuts the tension. You need to believe everyone's capable of murder, and Doug just sounds like he's reading a grocery list.
No sound effects, no music - just narration. Clean production. Fine by me. The Scottish setting comes through in the writing itself, the descriptions of freezing wilderness and isolation, and the narrators let that atmosphere do its work.
This Is Not How Hospitals Work. Trust Me. (But Also, There Aren't Many Hospitals)
Fair warning: this isn't a medical thriller, so I didn't get to yell at my dashboard about defibrillator protocols. The violence is more psychological than clinical. What Foley does well is the claustrophobia of being trapped with people you don't trust. As someone who works twelve-hour shifts in a building with people at their absolute worst and best, I know what close quarters and high stakes do to group dynamics. Foley nails that pressure-cooker feeling - the way old resentments surface, the way alcohol loosens tongues, the way everyone watches everyone else. That part felt real.
The content warnings are worth noting: violence, substance use, manipulation, stalking, animal death (it IS a hunting lodge). Nothing gratuitous, but it's there.
Who's Checking In and Who Should Check Out
If you liked The Guest List (also Foley), you'll recognize the formula here - multiple narrators, remote location, terrible people, someone dies. Some readers find the two books almost interchangeable. I'd say Hunting Party is the rougher draft, the practice run before Foley really tightened her game. Murder List scratched a similar itch for me — same kind of cast you're rooting against, same slow pressure building toward a payoff that lands harder than you expected.
This works for listeners who enjoy slow-burn psychological suspense and don't mind spending time with characters they'd never want as friends. If you need a fast plot or a twist that genuinely shocks, you might end up frustrated.
Perfect for that post-shift decompression when you want something engaging enough to keep you awake on the drive but not so complex you'll miss a turn. I'd bump the speed to 1.25x through the middle section - it needs the push.
Night Shift Discharge Notes
Solid atmosphere, strong audio production, predictable payoff. The multi-narrator format earns its keep, but the story doesn't quite earn those ten hours. I didn't yell at my dashboard, but I did mutter "come ON" more than once. Carlos asked why I was still cleaning three hours later. I blamed the coffee.
