The Hunting Party

The narrative flashes back to three days earlier. Loch Corrin is a Highland wilderness resort. For most of the year, it’s a private residence, but four times a year the owners allow one party to reserve it. Emma is pleased that her party was able to reserve it for a popular time—New Year’s Eve—for their reunion of university friends. She’s eager to make the reunion successful and fun.

Katie and her friends travel by train to Loch Corrin. She feels self-conscious being single when the others are couples. At the train station, Loch Corrin’s gamekeeper, a young good-looking man, picks them up. During the drive to the lodge at Loch Corrin, a red stag suddenly leaps onto the road in their path and stares them down before leaping away. Miranda tries to get Katie to pay attention to the attractive gamekeeper. Katie muses that although Miranda has never liked Katie’s boyfriends, Katie wouldn’t have picked Miranda’s longtime partner, Julien, for her either. As the group continues to drive further into the wilderness, they start to feel some discomfort at their impending isolation.

Doug, Loch Corrin’s the gamekeeper, loves his job but not the guests. This new group of guests bothers him because of their obvious wealth and touchiness. He’s grateful for his job because “[b]efore he came here, he did a terrible thing. More than one thing, actually” (17). His least favorite part of the job is taking the guests out stag-stalking. They tend to be bad—even irresponsible—hunters. Doug has “taken lives, many of them in fact. And not just animal” (18). Despite his dislike of the guests and his dark past, Doug enjoys working in nature.

The narrative flashes forward a couple days to January 2, 2019. In the 24 hours before Heather heard about the dead body, a guest went missing, and the weather conditions were so fierce that Mountain Rescue couldn’t assist. Loch Corrin is completely snowed in, and Doug and Heather try their best to search the immediate area. However, at 50,000 acres, Loch Corrin is too immense to do a proper search on their own. Heather is horrified but not surprised at the news of the body and worries about Doug, who “used to be in the marines, so he must have seen his fair share of death. But then so did I, in my old line of work. I know that it never quite leaves you, the existential horror of it” (25). Doug asks her to come see the body because he suspects that the death wasn’t accidental.

The narrative switches back to December 30, 2018. Emma and Miranda aren’t the best friends in the group, but since Samira had her baby, Priya, and Katie is mostly absent, Miranda has been relying on Emma’s company. When the group arrives at the lodge, they learn that despite the policy of exclusivity, another party (a couple from Iceland) is staying there too. Heather has arranged for the group to go stag-stalking the next day with Doug, who Miranda thinks she intimidates. As Julien tries to make everyone comfortable, Miranda notes how much her husband wants people to like him. Heather tells them how to hike around the estate and find the former lodge location, which burned down a century ago and left 24 people dead. The rumor was that the gamekeeper, who was traumatized by his experiences in the war, had set the fire as a murder-suicide.

The group finds out that the railroad stop was developed at the request of the estate’s original owner and that the estate was once in the practice of illegally distilling whiskey. Some whiskey bottles on the estate apparently have yet to be discovered. Heather tells the guests that if they plan to hike far away from the lodge, they should tell her or Doug for safety reasons. She warns them about the possibility of poachers on the estate—people who sneak in to hunt game and sell animal meat on the “black market.”

Katie notices that Miranda is dismissive of Samira and her baby, Priya. Miranda takes Katie aside and tells her that she’s missed her now that the only person she has to hang out with regularly is Emma. Katie and Miranda are the oldest friends in the group. Katie knows that Miranda can be mean but also deeply kind. Miranda was always popular and chose Katie as a friend over all the other girls. Katie notices a man standing frozen in the shadows but realizes that it’s only a statue. Nick and his boyfriend, Bo, visit Katie in her room; she was the only one assigned to a separate car in the train, and they wonder if Emma purposely arranged it that way. Later, Katie notices that the statue is gone.

The narrative flashes forward to January 2, 2019. As Heather follows Doug to the body, she thinks back to her first impressions of the group. They’d admitted to having a disagreement before their friend went missing. Even before that, however, they were notably posh and full of tension. The Icelandic couple, on the other hand, seem relaxed and experienced with wilderness adventures. They knew about the Highland Ripper, someone wanted for the recent murders of six victims in the Western Highlands. The Icelandic man, Ingvar, asked Doug about lamping, a hunting practice in which lights are used to freeze animals in fear. Doug considers it inhumane. Because of the Icelandic couple’s experiences in nature, Heather accepted their help in searching for the missing guest. Heather wonders how the guests perceive her; she imagines that they find her organized and would be surprised if they knew about her drinking problem.

The narrative flashes back to December 30, 2018. Miranda is annoyed that Samira doesn’t join the group for dinner. She finds Samira too overbearing about her daughter, and Miranda thinks that maybe she’s lucky for not being able to get pregnant. At dinner, Miranda flirts with Doug to make Julien jealous. Since their sex life has started revolving around her optimal fertility days, she wants to spice it up. She notices that the Icelandic man can’t stop looking at Katie. Miranda remembers when Katie used to be plain and admires how Katie has learned to make herself attractive.

At dinner, Emma chats with Iain, another manager of Loch Corrin. She is anxious about sharing the space with so many strangers but is relieved that everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Julien makes a drunken toast to her, and she feels proud.

Miranda interrupts Doug in his cottage to ask him to light a fire in the lodge. Doug finds Miranda attractive but annoying. She strikes him as a woman who’s accustomed to getting what she wants.

The narrative flashes forward to January 2, 2019. Heather usually admires the large lake and the thick trees, but on her search for the missing guest, she finds them foreboding. She wonders about Doug, whom she knows little about and who chose to live in the most isolated cottage. Doug takes her to one of the waterfalls and points to the body below. Heather notices blood around the head and a dark mark around the neck; the person wasn’t dressed for the cold weather. She agrees with Doug’s assessment that the death doesn’t look accidental.

The narrative flashes back to December 30, 2018. Most of the friends stay up after dinner, drinking in the lodge and making fun of Ingvar, who made many comments about the natural bloodlust of the human being. Emma worries that Doug, who’s setting up the fire, can overhear them mocking Ingvar. When Doug leaves, Miranda lights a cigarette despite the strict no-smoking-indoors policy. The group reminisces about Miranda’s stalker, a person (whom they assume was a man) who in college would steal small things from her and return them with a note.

Miranda enjoys bringing up the story of her stalker, pleased that she can shock people and make them question their own sense of security. However, she also worries about the stalker more than she likes to admit; the stalker knows deep-held secrets about her—for example, that Miranda likes to shoplift, that she paid for an essay that she wanted to plagiarize for class, and that she took a pregnancy test after cheating on Julien. Although she hasn’t received any notes from the stalker for a couple years, Miranda is still jumpy when she misplaces something or when she’s left alone.

Giles brings up their New Year’s trip to Wales, where they stayed in a spooky house. For this group of friends, “It is a favorite hobby, raking over our shared history together. These are the experiences that have always bound us, that have given us a tribal sense of affiliation” (92). On another New Year’s trip, the first that Emma spent with them, Mark got in a fight with teenagers. The group had moved past it, and in telling the story Emma characterizes Mark as fighting in self-defense. However, Katie never forgot it and has felt a bit scared of Mark ever since.

Doug had friends and a live-in girlfriend who waited for him during his tours in Afghanistan. However, after he did the awful thing, she left him, and even his family distanced themselves from him. The sounds of the party in the lodge annoy Doug. He gives up on sleeping and starts drinking.

The narrative flashes forward to January 2, 2019. Heather calls the police to report the death of her guest. The investigator asks a few questions about who else is in the area. The narrative implies that the investigation could be easy, given that the murderer would likely be one of the 13 remaining people. The investigator asks if Heather noticed anything strange. Heather remembers hearing the guest’s baby cry and then seeing a flashing light outside, but she doesn’t tell the investigator because she doesn’t know what it means, if anything. She also doesn’t tell the investigator that on New Year’s Eve, she was drunk. Due to the weather conditions, the police are unsure when officers can get to the scene. The narrative implies but doesn’t confirm that the investigator assigned to the Loch Corrin case is also investigating the Highland Ripper.

The narrative flashes back to December 30, 2018. Around 2:30 in the morning, the group is still up partying. Miranda catches Katie in a side conversation about Samira, about how much she’s changed since having a baby. Miranda takes out a bag of pills and proposes escalating the party. It reminds Katie of the group’s trip to Ibiza when they were in their 20s, when Katie took the drugs because she didn’t want to be a buzzkill. She recalls being high when she had sex with a man she didn’t remember the next day. This time, Katie can easily refuse taking the pills because others do too. Samira, Nick, Bo, and Katie don’t take the drugs. The friends start dancing, and Katie notes how closely Mark dances with Miranda, his years-long crush on full display. Only Julien, who stares out the window into the darkness, isn’t having fun.

Miranda notices that Katie looks like she’s forcing herself to have fun. Miranda has been annoyed that Katie has been so distant because of her intense work schedule and sick mother. Now that Miranda has been dealing with infertility and a growing distance between her and her husband, she feels that she needs Katie more than ever. Miranda worries that Katie has outgrown her, but that worry is quickly replaced with a feeling of betrayal that Katie has left her out of her life—even though Miranda is the one who made Katie who she is. The friends play Twister, and Miranda is caught off guard when Mark touches her too intimately. She’s always known about his crush, and has enjoyed it, but doesn’t want it to go too far.

When Miranda goes to the bathroom to splash water on her face, Mark corners her and grabs at her, telling her that Julien doesn’t deserve her. He wants to tell her a secret about Julien, but Miranda refuses to listen. When they return to the main room, Miranda wants to talk to Katie, but she’s no longer in the room. She tells Julien that she wants to go to bed, but the drugs have had a bad effect on him. Miranda steps outside the lodge on her own and walks with the light of her iPhone. In the distance, she sees three rectangles of light. She rushes to her cabin and notices that the door doesn’t lock. Miranda gets ready for bed, but Julien doesn’t join her.

Miranda wakes up at four o’ clock in the morning and sees Julien standing in the doorway. He tells her that he went for a walk to calm down from the drugs. He says that he saw Doug out by the lake. Miranda tells him that he should worry less about Doug and more about Mark, who came on to her and wanted to tell her about Julien’s dirty secret. She asks Julien if it’s the same secret she already knows, worried that Julien has broken their pact not to tell anyone else. She tries to have sex with him, but he refuses her. Miranda notices that the back of his hair is damp. Julien tells her that it rained a little, and Miranda realizes that he’s lying to her.

A year earlier, Julien asked Miranda to help a friend design a website for a new business. When Miranda was paid a large sum for the work, she confronted Julien about the nature of the business. He obfuscated, but she figured out it that must be insider trading.