A group of old university friends spend New Year in a remote Scottish hunting lodge.
It is the first time they have got together for years, but it doesn't take long for old tensions to resurface...
The slow drip of revelation as we learn more about the characters' past and present relationships ensures that Lucy Foley's gripping thriller stays chilling to the final page.
As with many popular crime novels at the moment, you will only achieve maximum enjoyment if you embrace the schadenfreude of reading about middle-class, privileged, spoilt people seeing their lives unravel. But Foley has managed to make her characters fascinating in their unpleasantness, and constructed a very clever plot to enmesh them in. The result is Peter’s Friends enjoyably recast as melodrama.
Foley is better know for her epic stories set in excotic locations. In The Hunting Party, she takes us to the isolated wilds of Scotland where a group of old university friends gather for New Year. But old rivalries result in someone dying - and pretty much everyone is a suspect! A proper whodunit, which deftly cranks up the tension.
When nine university friends head to the Scottish Highlands to see in the New Year, the plan is to catch up and kick back. But when the clock strikes midnight, a body is discovered in the snow. Unable to flee after a blizzard blows in, the occupants find themselves trapped with a murderer - but who struck the final blow? The suspense will keep you reading long after lights out.
With a nimble back-and-forth structuree that leaves you guessing who has been murdered until over halfway, an epic location and characters who feel all-too-real as London's most entitled, this is a modern whodunnit.
A recent trend in crime fiction, exemplified by the bestselling novels of Ruth Ware, has been to examine how close-knit groups of friends can have much of the same dysfunctionality that often afflicts families. Such books usually feature characters on the brink of middle age discovering that neither they nor their cherished chums are quite the same people they used to be in their carefree youth.. As with many popular crime novels at the moment, you will only achieve maximum enjoyment if you embrace the schadenfreude of reading about middle-class, privileged, spoilt people seeing their lives unravel. But Foley has managed to make her characters fascinating in their unpleasantness, and constructed a very clever plot to enmesh them in. The result is Peter's Friends enjoyably recast as melodrama.
