Chilling in the Swiss Alps

• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Sarah Gilmartin
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

Mullan singles out Ruth Rendell as an author so adept at setting that it feels as if she has literally trodden the ground of her fictional backdrops: "You feel that she might do the research for each new novel simply by fixing on some locality and then tramping around it, noting those details of topography that can only ever be recorded, never just imagined. This is the trick of it, getting the place right."

The same can be said of many Irish crime writers. At a glance, Tana French's moody Dublin landscapes, the fraught Troubles backdrop in Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy series and, more recently, Andrea Carter's lush Donegal setting in her Inishowen Mysteries have put very different parts of Ireland on the international crime fiction map.

The chief success of Sarah Pearse's debut novel, The Sanatorium, is her use of place. Set over a long weekend in an isolated, five-star hotel in the Swiss Alps, the novel is a colourful and tense murder mystery with a chilling (in more ways than one) atmosphere. The plot sees Elin Warner, an English detective currently on sabbatical after misjudging a case, accept an invitation from her estranged brother Isaac to celebrate his engagement to an old family friend, Laure.

Accompanying Elin is boyfriend Will, a convincing and sympathetic character who spends most of the book trying to get his girlfriend to confront her past traumas. (No holiday for poor Will!) The fractious sibling relationship between Elin and Isaac stems from the death of their brother Sam in childhood. Although a somewhat cliched storyline, the realities of the years of animosity between the siblings makes for interesting reading.

Things escalate when Laure goes missing and a hotel employee is discovered dead in a swimming pool. Pearse is good at pace, using age-old crime fiction tools to help increase the stakes. A freak snowstorm cuts the hotel off from society, and from the police, and as the body count starts to rise, Elin must unravel the mystery before more people - including herself and her loved ones - wind up dead.

There is a pleasing pressure-cooker feel to proceedings, reminiscent of Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None. Pearse uses clever red herrings - secrets, pills, affairs, mental illness - and the stand-off scenes between Elin and the murderer are genuinely scary. The setting proves ideal: slippery outdoor swimming pools, floor-to-ceiling glass...