Moving between characters – the attractive one the successful plain one the newcomer to the group – it quickly becomes clear that there is a lot these old friends are hiding from each other.įoley excels at the small details that make up a person. They might have known each other for years, but “even as they laughed and jostled and teased one another, I could sense something underneath it – something off”, the lodge’s manager, Heather, tells us. Foley goes on to carefully, slyly circle the truth, moving her narrative back and forth between the discovery of the murder and the friends’ arrival in the lodge. By 2 January, a body has been found and a huge snowstorm means the party can’t leave the property. We know from the start that this reunion isn’t going to go well. Plagued by nightmares and insomnia, “somehow, in this dried-out town, can feel his blood beginning to course once again”.įrom devastating heat to snow: in Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party (Harper Collins) a group of old friends from university travel to an exclusive lodge in the remote Scottish Highlands for New Year. He gives his story deliciously noirish overtones, from the gorgeous bookseller with “troubled green eyes” named Mandalay Blonde (“Everyone calls me Mandy”), to the gloriously named local drunk, Harley Snouch, and the Black Dog Motel. Hammer’s writing is so evocative the heat practically rises off the pages of Scrublands a scene where the town’s men fight a bushfire is brought to life in terrifying style. Martin is writing a “one year on” piece, but soon finds himself drawn into the mystery of why Byron Swift summarily executed these five men in this town as “hot as Hades”.

A year earlier, the town’s charismatic young priest inexplicably shot dead five members of his congregation, before he was killed himself. Martin Scarsden is a journalist with PTSD who is sent by his editor to Riversend (population 800).

The hunting party lucy foley film