She receives a mysterious message from Laure asking to meet at the penthouse, but when Elin goes to meet her, Laure is already dead in the lift. Elin’s suspicions land on Laure when CCTV proves that she is still alive and hiding somewhere in the hotel. One of the hotel employees, Adele, turns up dead in one of the pools, and Elin must investigate on behalf of the local police. Will tries to enjoy their trip, but Elin has a sense of unease that she can’t shake.Īfter Laure goes missing, an avalanche traps a few guests and members of staff in the hotel. Elin and Will arrive a few days before everyone else, but a snowstorm looms, pummeling the mountain resort. Two years later, Isaac’s fiancée Laure is working at the hotel as an assistant manager, and the pair decide to invite family and friends to Le Sommet to celebrate their engagement. His disappearance is downplayed, so as not to sour the hotel opening. In the prologue, Daniel Lemaitre, the hotel architect, is accosted by a masked assailant while leaving the unfinished hotel site. Isaac’s fiancée, Laure Strehl, works at Le Sommet, a hotel in the Swiss Alps that was built on the site of an old sanatorium where tuberculosis patients were once treated. The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse (Bantam, £12.Protagonist Elin Warner is a young police detective from the UK, who with her boyfriend Will Riley has gone to Switzerland to celebrate her brother Isaac’s engagement. It would look great in a limited TV series on a streaming platform. The writer spent part of her twenties there and she evokes a breathtaking view of snow-covered mountain ranges seen through the sparkling windows of a high-end accommodation that most of us could never see the inside of. Le Sommet is a fictional luxury hotel converted from an abandoned sanatorium high in the real Alpine municipality of Crans-Montana.

What Pearse absolutely has going for her is an incredible setting. It’s like Christie got distracted by a Resident Evil video game while pottering with Poirot. But smashing that with ultra-violent torture scenes carried out by a gas mask-wearing villain can sometimes be jarring. The enforced mixing of the super-rich with the middle and lower classes is straight out of any number of Christie books. Pearse lives in Devon, the writing home of Agatha Christie, so she can be forgiven for taking a little influence from her.

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The sanatorium review