The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse: Chilling murder mystery set in the Swiss Alps

The Sanatorium

Author: Sarah Pearse

ISBN-13: 978-1787633315

Publisher: Bantam

Guideline Price: £12.99

In How Novels Work, a superb manual on fiction by the English professor and Guardian editor John Mullan, the author discusses the importance of creating a sense of place in crime fiction and thrillers. Typically, the essence of detection begins with a particular location – the crime scene.

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.

Past traumas

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 windows, the austere beauty of the glacial mountains, the shadows and low lighting of the posh hotel. Right from the beginning, in a claustrophobic scene in a mountain funicular, there is the sense of no escape.

Swiss landscape

Pearse lives in Devon with her family but in her 20s she moved to Switzerland and was a keen mountain explorer. She still has a home in the Swiss Alpine town of Crans Montana and her affinity with the landscape is evident on the page. She studied English and creative writing at the University of Warwick, and her short fiction has been published in Mslexia and Litro. Comparisons have been drawn between The Sanatorium and bestsellers such as The Couple Next Door and The Girl on the Train, but the novel most resembles the writing of Pearse’s contemporary Ruth Ware, who excels at turning commonplace events – a hen party weekend, a cruise ship holiday, a boarding school reunion – into nightmare scenarios.

Pearse also writes with her finger on the pulse. The book references, for example, the Norway terror attacks of 2011 where Anders Breivik murdered 69 people on Utoya island before police could reach the remote location. The title, meanwhile, comes from the hotel’s history as a hospital for mentally-ill women in the 1920s, which provides a distressing and believable backstory.

Two descriptors

Prose is clear and functional, though Pearse’s style of using two descriptors where one will do (“intertwined, connected”; “wholly, absolutely”; “sinister, alien”) can be frustrating. There is a tendency to give too much of Elin’s inner thoughts and calculations, which irks as the plot thickens in the second half. Elsewhere, the odd cliche – “A shiver shoots down Elin’s spine: a cold prickle of fear” – can be forgiven in a book that is generally strong at giving fresh character description and detail.

In this era of Covid-19, meanwhile, the choice of a gas mask to conceal the murderer’s identity seems particularly inspired (and gruesome): “All Daniel can see is the lurid magnified close-up of the black rubber stretched across the face. The ribbed lines of the hose. Then he hears the breathing; a strange, wet sucking sound coming from the mask. Liquid exhalations.”