The tale is told from multiple viewpoints by guests Emma, Katie and Miranda and staffers Heather and Doug. She’s a sexual magnet, knows it, and uses this power to manipulate others and to cutely giggle her way out of the consequences of her cruelest and most obnoxious behavior. Most of the “planets” spend part of their time loving her and part of the time loathing her. What’s clear is that, while all the guests are in one sense or another children of privilege, even if not necessarily born to money, it’s the ghastliest and most privileged of them all, Miranda, who’s the sun around which the others are planets in orbit.

A gay couple plus the couple with a small child aren’t as ghastly because we’re barely aware of them as characters moreover, while they’re not ghastly now the two parents at least have clearly been ghastly in the past, back in their good ol’ uni days: they got their ghastliness in early, so to speak. Two of them that initially I quite warmed to prove to be as ghastly as the others, if not ghastlier. The first thing to recognize is that most of the members of the party are ghastly.

There’s a serial killer at large in the region. The estate is isolated from the rest of the world by a severe snowstorm. However, early on New Year’s Day one of them goes missing, and the next day the murdered corpse is found by the estate staff. A bunch of old Oxford University friends get together every year for a New Year’s holiday, and this time they’ve come to a remote Scottish estate for the celebrations.

The hunting party book cover