Rating:

Suspicion, Isolation, and Blatant Stupidity

Author: Sarah Pearse

Before becoming a prestigious, ultra-modern, isolated mountain hotel, Le Sommet was the final destination for the insane. There are still vestiges of this former life, including the carefully displayed medical instruments in glass cases that ominously link the building’s past and present. But the clientele are paying big bucks, so everything must be ok, right?

Elin is a detective on leave, suffering from PTSD. She’s traveled with her long-time boyfriend, Will, to Le Sommet for her estranged brother’s engagement. But this trip is about answers, not fixing family problems. Elin’s younger brother died when she was little. Supposedly, he fell and hit his head. But Elin suspects Isaac, the estranged older brother. He always had a sinister way about him. Clearly, the perfect time to confront Issac with decades worth of close-held suspicions is now, during one of the happiest moments of his life, in an isolated location, at their first reunion, while Elin herself is out of a job and her own relationship is on shaky ground, after spending a ton of money to get here. Yep, can’t see any problems with the logic there.

Meanwhile, a bad blizzard complete with convenient avalanches is on the horizon, and Elin and company miss the last bus out, as you do. They’re stranded, everything is creepy and weird, Isaac’s fiancé is missing, and dead bodies with mutilated hands are starting to pop up. With the Swiss cops unable to pass the snow, they defer to Elin, who investigates by accusing everyone and noticing absolutely no details about anything. The glacier slow, insipid story has started, and only Elin can further screw up a great setting and premise by accusing everyone, randomly, until the villain gives herself away, thanks to a trail of chipped nail polish.

I wanted to like this story so very much. The setting is simply to die for. A converted asylum, still filled with creepy medical paraphernalia, a snowstorm, the Alps? It’s giving Overlook hotel vibes, and I wanted to believe. I fought to believe and become enmeshed in the atmosphere, but there are just too many problems, and Elin was a vibe kill from the word go.

The chapters jump around, randomly, in perspective. It is disjointed. We hear from some of the murder victims, but only briefly. This leaves us hanging. This is a story unfinished, a moment clearly created to escalate tension that instead delivers frustration.

Meanwhile, Elin is an annoying protagonist. The story with her brother was both unnecessary and overwrought. Why has she waited 30+ years to just ask a basic question? And her suspicions, what are they based on? Bad feelings about a dude who seems pretty normal? Why were they previously estranged then, if not for this, and why did Isaac suddenly invite her but none of the rest of his family or any of his friends to this engagement party? None of it calculates.

And the big reveal? Sigh. It’s so lame. So unnecessary. So anticlimactic and predictable and dumb. But does Elin learn from it? Nope . . .

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

The Swiss police just giving over jurisdiction to this British cop – one on potential permanent leave for PTSD – is beyond unbelievable. The author tries, setting Elin up with phone calls from the Swiss side as they debate how, really, this isn’t SOP at all, but what the heck, snow, active murderer, what you gonna do? It rings false – a flimsy plot device. Why are avalanches always lame in books? They should be scary, isolating, not… not this.

As Elin discovers body after body, she keeps thinking “oh, so and so just must have died naturally, face down in this freezing pool, with fingers cut off, wearing a weird old sanatorium mask.” Yeah . . . that seems totally natural to me. Only after some “investigating” do these deaths seem suspicious and despite the killer’s obvious attempts to give any and all clues available. Elin doesn’t even think to look into the asylum’s past until near the very end of the book. Just what? How is this woman a cop?

Oh, and those fingers the killer lops off and puts in display cases, don’t ever expect an explanation for that at all, because there isn’t one.

As the snow falls and the characters flail around and the bodies pile up, Elin accuses everyone in turn, getting it wrong each and every time. Blatantly wrong. Finally, after following a trail of chipped nail polish, the answers unravel. The dumb, overly complicated, unbelievable, maniacal (with a capital M!) killers come forward. The confrontation is the most unbelievable jumble of nonsensical mishmash I’ve ever read. The motive makes zero sense. Essentially, the killer wants to be caught so she can tell her story to the police. Lady, you do know that you could have just called, right?

And in the end, surprise, maybe another twist! Maybe another creepy stalker. No. No. I’m done.

Sometimes all that glitters, is not gold, but a freshly steaming pile of, well, you-know-what. Despite the perfect setting for a creepy cadre of crime, The Sanatorium falls flatter than a gleaming cow pat in a pile of fresh snow. Not recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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