The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

A group of friends decide to to spend their New Year in a lodge miles away from anywhere in the wilds of Scotland. It will just be them, the lodge manager, and hunting instructor. They are planning on having fun, drinking, eating rich foods, and going hunting. They each bring with them their own emotional baggage and their secrets, but they are all good friends and there shouldn't be any problems, right? Wrong. By New Year's Day, one of them will be dead. And one of them is the murderer.

I just loved the premise of this story, and I liked the way that each chapter is told from the perspective of each of the friends (though a tad confusing at times). They relate how they know each other, and what they truly think of each other. The lodge owner and the instructor also get to tell their own stories of how they ended up working in such a remote location. As we learn more about their characters, we are led to be suspicious of most of them, and try to work out who could be the murderer. The only downside of this toing and froing of characters, is that you lose the tension of mystery and thriller. However, I loved the descriptions of how the friends are cocooned in this lodge, with lights on, gathered around a big table having fun, but through the large glass floor to ceiling windows all they can see is the blackness of the outside, and the snow starting to cover the ground, and the fact that they can't see much out, but anyone outside can see straight in.

I can't say that it kept me on the edge of my seat, but I did enjoy reading it. It was overlong though, I did skim read a few pages. I also didn't really like any of the characters, but that's possibly the point - any of them could be a murderer. A good, but not brilliant, murder mystery.