The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse @RandomTTours

I’m delighted to be part of the blog tour today for The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse. Many thanks to Anne Cater for my blog tour invite and review copy of the book.

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

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.

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’re all in…

The Sanatorium is a chilling, claustrophobic debut novel that exudes class with its intelligently written, dark narrative. From the first moment I saw that eerie but stunningly beautiful cover, The Sanatorium wove it’s spooky spell on me, delivering a shocking storyline from start to finish.

Elin arrives at the isolated hotel in the Swiss Alps to spend time with her brother and his new fiancée. Her boyfriend Will is also along for the occasion and they arrive during the threat of stormy weather to come-both in the atmosphere and in the beautifully converted sanatorium. When her brothers fiancée goes missing the morning after Elin arrives, she puts her detective skills to the test to find out where she has gone and more importantly…why?

This was an intriguing mystery set within one of the most creepy settings I’ve encountered recently. The Sanatorium had a haunting atmosphere with the walls of its achingly beautiful renovation seemingly saturated with the echos of its unsavoury history. And this, combined with Elin’s family secrets hidden in the past, made The Sanatorium a gripping read-a gothic chiller that holds you prisoner, almost as it does Elin herself.

An accomplished debut novel that kept me on the edge of my seat with its short, sharp chapters and twisty plot.

Sarah Pearse lives by the sea in South Devon with her husband and two daughters. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and worked in Brand PR for a variety of household brands. After moving to Switzerland in her twenties, she spent every spare moment exploring the mountains and still has a home in the Swiss Alpine town of Crans Montana, the dramatic setting that inspired her novel. Sarah has always been drawn to the dark and creepy – remote spaces and abandoned places – so when she read an article in a local Swiss magazine about the history of sanatoriums in the area, she knew she’d found the spark of the idea for her debut novel, The Sanatorium. Her short fiction has been published in a wide variety of magazines and has been shortlisted for several prizes. You can find Sarah on Twitter @SarahVPearse and Instagram @sarahpearseauthor