The setting is fabulous - a luxury hotel, once a sanatorium with a dark history, set high in the Alps, where the weather can be so brutal that visibility is non-existent at times and evacuations happen, cutting the hotel off from the outside world making it the perfect place for a crime to occur. There is a nod here to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None – guests trapped in a physical environment where it is impossible to leave, murders abounding, suspicion cast on everyone, friends doubting each other, and outside help unavailable.

Elin and her boyfriend arrive at Le Sommet to celebrate her brother Isaac’s engagement to his girlfriend, Laure. Elin has been estranged from her brother for many years because of an incident that happened decades before. Still, she decides that this occasion would be an opportunity to re-connect with him.

On leave from her job as a detective, Elin is suffering from PTSD in the aftermath of a case she was solving and so has taken time off to recuperate and consider her career options. She is unsure whether she can return to her former role.

Elin’s sense of dread when she arrives at the hotel is palpable, and it is not long before events take a sinister turn. Her brother’s fiancé goes missing, and a hotel employee is found dead on the premises. There are cryptic clues left by the killer that hark back to the hotel’s previous use – a sanatorium, a place where people needed to be kept away from society lest they spread lung diseases afflicting them.

The writer crafts the gothic atmosphere well. There is a sense of claustrophobia, of being snowed in, of never escaping pervades the novel. Pearse has created a tense atmosphere, and her descriptions of the environment are well written. The reader feels the closed atmosphere pushing down on the hotel and its guests as the weather worsens by the day. The tension of being trapped and the anxiety of getting off the mountainside is captured well. The race against time and the scenes of inclement weather conditions make good reading.

My problem with this novel is with the protagonist. We are constantly reminded that she has PTSD, but the absence of sufficient backstory about what had happened to her to be commensurate with her ongoing trauma made it difficult to feel empathy for her character. She is needy, triggered by many things, hardly eats and has panic attacks, asthma and headaches. I found her irritating. It isn’t until halfway through the novel Elin finds her voice and takes control of what has happened at the hotel, but this happens far too quickly to be believable. Not one of the characters is particularly likeable. They lack dimension and are not fleshed out enough for this reader to connect with them.

The plot is fast-paced and compelling, but I felt that the sub-plot, with its revelation about the reasons for the estrangement between Elin and her brother, was a distraction. The characters are in the middle of an already frantic murder hunt, so the reveal in the sub-plot was unnecessary and not believable. There is not enough build-up to the epiphany relating to Elin’s past. Her character is already burdened by trauma from her last case with the police force, so the subsequent revelation about what occurred when she and Isacc were children is too much for one novel. This section needed much more introspection and time to process on both Elin’s and Issac’s parts.

I found the punctuation very frustrating, especially the overuse of colons where a comma or a semicolon could have done the job. The use of italics was also irritating where rhetorical questions were asked. The novel would have worked better in the past tense. There are ninety-two chapters, some of them one and a half pages. It was unnecessary to split scenes into yet another chapter when the story could have continued in the same chapter. It disrupted the flow and gave the book a choppy feel.

I was torn by this novel. I could feel the sleet, the frost, the snow, the avalanche waiting to happen in the bitter winter. I felt the cold. It’s the protagonist I couldn’t warm to.