Supriya's Banter
The Sanatorium
Author: Sarah Pearse
Publisher: Corgi (30 December 2021); Corgi
Language: English
Paperback: 448 pages
Imagine being snowed in at a grand, glass-and-steel hotel perched high in the Swiss Alps. The sleek, remote hotel hides a dark history; it’s a refurbished, reimagined, newest avatar of a tuberculosis sanatorium where patients were isolated and subjected to serious and often grim treatments. But that’s not all. The history gets more unsettling as you dig deeper.
Detective Elin Warner isn’t exactly thrilled to be at Le Sommet. She’s still recovering from a traumatic case and nursing old wounds from her childhood. But she’s come along—reluctantly—for her estranged brother’s engagement party. Just as she starts settling in, his fiancée disappears.
Then the snowstorm rolls in, and the hotel goes into lockdown. Elin, already shaky, finds herself in the middle of the storm, investigating a case that soon turns its claws on her and becomes more personal than she can handle.
The location is the real showstopper here. Haunted by history with the past lingering in the marble, the walls, and the artefacts around the hotel, the ambience of the hotel adds to the tension.
Sarah Pearse turns the snow-covered mountains into a character of their own—silent, isolating, and impossible to escape. The more the blizzard intensifies, the more the hotel’s walls seem to close in. You feel the chill, the claustrophobia, and the dread with every page.
Elin is fragile, full of self-doubt, and trying hard not to drown in her past. That makes her frustrating at times and repetitive. Her emotional unravelling runs parallel to the central mystery, and as things heat up in the hotel, her buried trauma thaws too. But those are minor things and can be easily ignored in this thrilling, adrenaline-pumping ride.
Pearse does a good job of dangling clues without giving too much away, keeping you guessing till the end.
The moody thriller is as much about inner doubts and uncertainties that do more harm than good as it is about danger lurking outside.
If you like locked-room mysteries or are looking for a thriller soaked in snow, shadows, with psychological layers, this one’s worth a read.
The simmering tension and unease are quite appealing.
