The Sanatorium: gorgeous setting, plot kept losing me at the pass off

Elin Warner is a detective on leave, dealing with the fallout of a case gone bad, and she heads up to a former tuberculosis sanatorium turned luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps for her brother’s engagement party. The building has the history you’d want it to have, patients who died there, isolation wards, that whole atmosphere of a place built to keep sick people at a distance from healthy ones. When her brother’s fiancee goes missing during a snowstorm that cuts the hotel off from everything, Elin ends up investigating despite herself.

The setting did most of the heavy lifting for me here, and I say that as a compliment more than a knock. Pearse clearly did her homework on sanatorium history, the actual architecture of quarantine and cure, and there’s something in that premise that landed close to home given what I do for a living, wards built to separate the contagious from everyone else. My triage read on the opening chapters was cautious optimism, the mystery box gets set up efficiently and the isolation gimmick, snowed in, no signal, is a good engine for tension.

Where it lost me a little was in the back half, where the plotting starts leaning hard on Elin’s personal history and a subplot involving her father that felt bolted on rather than woven through, and I found myself reading a chapter, setting the book down for a shift, and coming back having half forgotten which thread was which. That’s a downtime clock problem more than a writing problem, this one really rewards longer sittings, which I did not have much of that stretch of nights. The reveal itself is fine, not a cheat, but it didn’t need the extra scaffolding it got. I didn’t need a real debrief after this one, just filed it and moved on. Solid atmosphere, average follow through.