Title: THE SANATORIUM
Author: Sarah Pearse
Publisher: Random House UK
Read: 2020
My Rating: 🌟🌟
Book Description:
An imposing, isolated hotel, high up
in the Swiss Alps, is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But she's taken
time off from her job as a detective, so when she receives an invitation out of
the blue to celebrate her estranged brother's recent engagement, she has no
choice but to accept.
Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge.
Though it's beautiful, something about the hotel, recently converted from an
abandoned sanatorium, makes her nervous - as does her brother, Isaac.
And when they wake the following morning to discover his fiancée Laure has
vanished without a trace, Elin's unease grows. With the storm cutting off
access to and from the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the
remaining guests start to panic.
My musings:
Given the atmospheric, claustrophobic setting in
the Swiss Alps during a blizzard I expected to like this book much more than I
did – I wonder what went wrong here?
Let’s start with the things I did enjoy, and the setting is definitely a treat.
An old sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps that has been converted into a fancy
but sinister hotel – it doesn’t get much better than this. And when a massive
blizzard cuts off the hotel from civilisation, and people start dying, the
stage is set for a tense closed door mystery. Pearse brings her setting to life
with vivid descriptions of the old TB sanatorium and its eerie presence despite
having been remodelled into a fancy resort. With a shady history, the building
itself seems to exude an air of menace and danger that made for a wonderful
backdrop.
So why didn’t it work for me? Probably a few reasons, and mostly to do with
reader preference.
1) Mainly, I found the whole premise extremely unbelievable, from the strange
way that people suddenly start dying, to the investigative efforts of a British
policewoman on leave for PTSD (who has absolutely no jurisdiction in
Switzerland), to the reveal of the final culprit and the motives of the murder
spree. I felt that the book suffered from the problem of “trying too hard” to
fit in everything under the sun to make it a twisty read, only to end up being
confusing and lacking cohesion.
2) The characters: even though I liked the premise of Elin, a policewoman with
PTSD, I felt that she always kept me at arms’ length and I didn’t bond with her
throughout the entirety of the book. As a detective she didn’t ring true for
me, even considering that she was recovering from a recent breakdown. As for
the other characters, not only did I find most of them thoroughly unlikeable,
but they also lacked believability for me. Some remained mere stereotypes I
never really got the hang of. I felt entirely emotionally detached throughout
the book, which took away a lot of the enjoyment for me.
3) I have found from previous experience that I do better with closed-door
mysteries if they are told from one POV only, which helps build suspense for
me. Here, the POVs from the murder victims made the story appear choppy, added
an added element of having to suspend disbelief and took away a lot of the
mystery for me. Again, personal preference, other readers will totally disagree
with me here.
4) The final reveal: given that the body count rises throughout the book, I
expected an evil villain with a strong motive and found the final reveal just a
bit lacklustre and – again – farfetched.
Summary:
All in all, THE SANATORIUM was a book that
contained all the things I usually love in a novel, but for various reasons did
not end up working well for me. With a wonderfully atmospheric setting and a
mounting body count, it will undoubtedly thrill other readers, though, so it’s
one you need to pick up and try for yourself rather than taking my personal
reader preferences into account here.
Thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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