The Sanitorium by Sarah Pearse

The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Time taken to read - 3 days

Pages - 384

Publisher - Bantam Press

Source - Bought

Blurb from Goodreads

You won’t want to leave. . . until you can’t.

Half-hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the former abandoned sanatorium has since been renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel.

An imposing, isolated getaway spot high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But Elin’s taken time off from her job as a detective, so when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at the hotel, Elin really has no reason not to accept.

Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge–there’s something about the hotel that makes her nervous. And when they wake the following morning to discover Laure is missing, Elin must trust her instincts if they hope to find her. With the storm closing off all access to the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the remaining guests start to panic.

Elin is under pressure to find Laure, but no one has realized yet that another woman has gone missing. And she’s the only one who could have warned them just how much danger they are all in. . .


My Review

A sanatorium being transformed into a fabulous remote hotel, we open with the early stages of renovation and something dark happens, fast forward five years later to present day. The hotel is up and running and detective Elin Warner is on her way there with her o/h, invited by her brother, celebrating his engagement. Her relationship with her brother Isaac is strained to say the least, she is distrustful, suspicious and when Isaac's fiancé disappears things kick up a notch.

I feel like this would have had a book before this one, Elin has PTSD from an incident, she isn't sure she is going to go back. She is indecisive about moving forward in her relationship, there is a huge issue with her brother. The story does slowly tease out some of the details but I feel we could have done with a bit more on Elin's backstory. Maybe this will be revisited if this becomes a series? I dunno I just felt Elin was a bit hard to settle to. She does come to her own a bit once everything kicks off at the hotel.

The book does manage to keep a feeling of tension throughout, there is enough to keep you interested but I felt myself drifting a bit when reading this. To be fair to the author, I feel a lot of this was about me, we have a lot going on just now and my reading mojo is a bit off.

The story has a fair bit going for it, murder, stalking, unresolved family issues/dramas, relationship issues (more than a few), isolation, police investigation, it has a whole lot going on. I didn't love it but I didn't hate it, maybe a different time I would have received it better, 3/5 for me.

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