The newest must-read British crime novel has to overcome the obstacle of starting from one of the genre’s most-read premises. In a remote and snow-bound location, one of a group of 11 guests celebrating the new year at a hotel is murdered. The killer must logically be one of the other 10 revellers, or one of the pair of staff at Loch Corrin, a luxury Highlands hunting lodge. However, these two vintage Agatha Christie elements – “Nobody will be able to come and go for days!”, and, “It could be any one of us!” – are freshly deployed by Lucy Foley in her debut, The Hunting Party (HarperCollins, £12.99), with intelligent attention to such issues as how isolation might be achieved, and pasts hidden, in a time of digital connectivity. Another brightly polished borrowing from the classic closed community mystery novel is the quantity of unsaid feelings and unspeakable memories among the cooped-up. A party of posh London thirtysomethings, up with their guns for a kind of post-marital stag party at Hogmanay, are marked by shifting alliances, and known and covert dalliances, developed through the many years since they met through university or work. The two other hotel guests and the Lodge employees are equally unlikely to be what they seem. A minor irritation is that Foley’s use of localised character viewpoint, rather than authorial narration or the perspective of the investigating detective, means that people are sometimes required to be more oblique and secretive about the past than is likely in the quiet of a mind or conscience. A guilt-stricken man remembers when “he did the thing”; a woman in conversation is “half tempted to tell him what I used to do, who I am”; a third resident reflects on the time “before things fell apart”. Private self-interrogation is sometimes evasive, but, here, the motive is not psychological denial, but the need to withhold giveaway details from the reader. In what seems set to be a strong career, Foley might usefully work on the balance between misleading narrative and human realism. The knack of ridiculously gripping narrative, however, she already has. The Hunting Party should be one of 2019’s big holiday reads.