Library Limelights 269

 

Sarah Pearse. The Sanatorium. Large Print. USA: Viking, Wheeler/Gale, 2021.

What a relief to reach the end of this book. A promising premise became bogged down in its own wandering maze. Elin Warner is a UK policewoman on extended leave after a traumatic case that taxed her mental health. With her boyfriend Will, she arrives at a deluxe Swiss mountain resort for a reunion with her brother Isaac and his fiancee, their childhood friend Laure. Unknown to all and sundry, the architect for the project had been murdered on the mountain months earlier. There’s not much to know about Elin except she’s tense and edgy all the time, privately blaming Isaac for their little brother’s death many years ago, wanting to resolve it, unable to articulate her complex feelings. (Another) brother and sister duo own/manage the hotel: Lucas and Cecile Caron. Inevitably, an avalanche serves to isolate them with some of the staff and guests in this renovated former tuberculosis hospital. The stage is set for a classic the-killer-is-one-of-us mystery. Yes indeed, someone is murdered, and then another, and then ...

In the absence of police authorities, Elin feels obliged to take charge—slowly, and shakily. The victims are wearing gruesome rubber masks that were once used to help sick patients breathe. One body is found in a hotel pool; attempts are made to kill Elin. Laure disappears: is she involved or is she a victim? Where is Margot the receptionist? No common denominator seems to exist among the victims. Elin overthinks everything and feels everything, from her resentment with Isaac to each scary new development in the murders. The author is straining so hard to elicit sympathy with repetitious visceral reactions (Elin’s gut in a knot, or her head exploding, every other page) that it has the opposite effect: Elin doesn’t seem at all fit for the job. Not all the pieces here fit well together. Motivation for the crimes is murky, but there is a deft little anticlimactic surprise.

One-liners

▪ There’s something brutally clinical about the architecture, the air of the institution in the stark lines, the relentless rectangular planes and faces, the modernist flat roofs. (40)

▪ “You want to leave?” Elin repeats, blindsided, panic surging through her, little pricking darts jagging at her nerves. (161)

▪ Elin’s muscles seize, the scene around her becoming strangely distant, dropping in and out of focus. (229)

▪ This is going to be an uphill struggle, the worst crime scene you could probably get: in constant flux, wind and snow collecting on top of other snow, eclipsing potential evidence, people already trampled over the scene, around the pool. (243)

▪ Each time someone speaks about Laure, the picture Elin has of her in her head shifts ever so slightly. (270)

▪ Two strong women still defined by sibling dynamics, fighting for oxygen against alpha brothers. (298)

▪ Elin’s heart lurches, a slick, oily dread loosening her stomach. (451)

Multi-liners

▪ Watching him, anger spikes in her chest. This brotherly concern, it’s an act; she’d clocked the fleeting, superior smile. (70)

▪ Elin can’t understand the French, but the feeling in Laure’s voice is clear. Sharp edged. Angry. (98)

▪ She can feel her heart beating faster. Swallowing hard, she’s conscious of not being able to control her response. (119)

▪ Her head feels like it’s going to explode. She doesn’t know what to feel. (140)

▪ Panic spools through her. She has to tell him, doesn’t she? Tell him what she really came here for, or she’s at risk of losing him. (201)

▪ “Now that someone else has been killed, the protocol we’ve advised is extremely important. Everyone needs to stay together. No exceptions.” (376-7)

▪ “Lucas found out earlier that you’re on extended leave. He’s uncomfortable with you carrying on in the circumstances.” (437)

Excuses

“Asthma. It’s been worse the last year or so. I don’t think the altitude helps. Or the dust in here.”

Laure nods, still watching her.

It’s a lie. It’s nothing to do with the asthma. She’s been at altitude before, and she can’t remember this feeling.

It’s this place. This building.

Her body is reacting to something here; something living, breathing, as much a part of it as its walls and floors. (79-80)

Force of Nature

“These avalanches ... they’re incredibly violent. The force of the fall acts like a grinder, dividing the snow into finer and finer particles. By the time it comes to a stop, the snow is so densely packed that you can’t use a blower, as the debris gets caught in the machine.” He clears his throat. “It’s the movement too. The avalanche warms a tiny layer of the snow, creating a liquid that freezes, so the avalanche isn’t just compacted, but set like concrete.” (239-40)

Lucas

“He didn’t have a normal childhood. When he did go back to school, he had a hard time.”

“Bullying?”

“Yes. He didn’t look right, you know? Her tone is bitter. “Weak, thin. Half the children teased him and the rest pitied him.”

“That’s stayed with him?”

“I think so. This place ... he’s never said it, but I think it’s about exorcising those ghosts. It was the impossible project. Someplace everyone said could never be resurrected.” Cecile shrugs. “Like him. No one thought he’d become what he has.”

“A point to prove,” Elin replies. “It’s the same with Isaac. He’s always had that need to be the best. The one on top.” (411-2)

Ann Cleeves. The Darkest Evening. UK: Macmillan, 2020.

A filler, again. It’s easy to see why Cleeves is so popular—the procedural assembling, the placid pacing, the country-fresh atmosphere. Inspector Vera Stanhope finds a live baby and a dead body, with the scene of the crime being Brockburn, the mansion of her distant Stanhope relatives who disdained her father Hector. The victim, Lorna, was the only child of Jill and Robert Falstone, nearby tenant farmers. Lorna’s life had not been a happy one—gossip that Robert was not her father and school bullying had led to hospitalization for anorexia. But having overcome such setbacks, lately the young woman seemed happy with her little boy Thomas, never revealing who his father was. Vera wants to piece together a picture of Lorna’s life in effort to discover who killed her. The police team goes into action with neighbourhood interviews; there’s no shortage of suspects and potential motives. That means Vera spends more time than she wants with the condescending Stanhopes: meek cousin Juliet, her entrepreneurial husband Mark Bolitho, and Juliet’s autocratic mother Harriet.

Soon after, the murder of Lorna’s good friend, Connie, only deepens the mystery. Did Connie know something damaging, that threatened someone? Juliet’s old friend Dorothy is the housekeeper at Brockburn; her cottage is nearby. But it’s not the cottage that Lorna painted so many times. Suddenly Thomas is kidnapped, adding a new intensity. All in all, most people are blaming themselves that they might have made a difference in preventing the deaths. Vera’s number one assistant Joe keeps her on track; her DC Holly works hard to prove herself. Set appropriately during the winter solstice (when I am reading it), it’s compelling enough, good fodder for curling up next to one of the wood stoves everyone in Northumberland seems to keep burning.

One-liners

▪ “I don’t ride and I don’t particularly like dogs, so I don’t fit in too well with the social scene here.” (49)

▪ There was a hint of reproach in her voice as if Juliet and Mark had somehow been responsible for Lorna’s dead body being found in their grounds. (87-8)

▪ “It makes no sense to kill a young mother.” (122)

▪ She paused, silent, going through the possible suspects in her head, trying to imagine who would have been so desperate or foolhardy to take the child, to scoop him up and run with him down the stairs and into the night. (329)

▪ She didn’t want her career, her life, to end in this place that reminded her of a war zone: dead trees like twisted limbs and animals ready to eat her flesh when she was gone. (343)

Multi-liners

▪ “Robert couldn’t understand it. Why would Lorna starve herself?” (64)

▪ “It must have been very urgent for Lorna to take the car without asking. Very, very urgent.” (82)

▪ Hector had adored his wife and had disliked Vera because she was nothing like her mother. That, at least, was how it had seemed to Vera. (84)

▪ “You do know Josh would never harm a fly,” Rosemary said. “We’re a close family.” (153)

▪ “You’ve found out more about Lorna in the four days since she died than I had in the last three years. What sort of mother does that make me?” (229-30)

Country life

She carried her tea into her little office and wondered how she’d explain the set-up at Brockburn to her colleagues. Even the ones who’d grown up in the country would find it difficult to understand the place of the big house in a community like Kirkhill. They’d be thinking it was all about money and class, Downton Abbey for the modern world: servants downstairs slaving for the rich above them. The rumours about Crispin Stanhope and Mark Bolitho’s adultery would feed into the myth.

Vera understood life in the country was a bit more nuanced these days than the plots of a costume drama, but she suspected the Stanhopes would still be pulling the strings. They owned the land the tenants farmed and the houses where they lived. People depended on them for their homes and their work, so life for employees could be precarious. The landed classes had the confidence that went with generations of living in the same place, knowing every inch. But still, there were obligations and responsibilities. Ownership would bring stress. She was glad that Hector had offended them all and been cast out, and she had no part of any of that. (106)

The illness

“Hadn’t her parents noticed?” Joe was horrified. “Why didn’t they do something before?”

“Anorexia is a sly disease. It creeps up on the sufferer. In the beginning, the parents might have encouraged the exercise, the decision of their child to cut out apparently unhealthy food. Weight can seem to drop away slowly at first. The sufferers are sly too. They hide. Throw away food when nobody’s looking. Exercise in secret. You have to know this is all about control. Control and compulsion. In chaotic and uncertain relationships, food is the one thing over which sufferers feel they have any power.” (159)

Robert, man of few words

“Did she talk to you about it?” Vera asked.

“Do you mean, did she ask if I was her real dad?” He stood looking out at the river, brown and swollen with melted snow. “No. We weren’t that sort of family. We just got on with things.”

“And she’d not have wanted to hurt you,” said Vera. “You’d always cared for her.”

“But I couldn’t save her, could I? She still got ill. And she still got killed.” (234)

Kimberly McCreight. Friends Like These. Ebook download from TPL. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2021.

Here’s a challenge for the sharpest armchair detective. Six friends shared a bad experience back in university days, partying on a rooftop, when a guest fell over the edge to his death. Cowards all, they self-justified their failure to call the police. Only unstable Alice wanted to make amends and literally died trying. Years later the five, still close friends, gather at Jonathan’s Catskills cottage for a surprise intervention: their friend Keith must be persuaded to enter rehab for drug abuse. Derrick, Maeve, and Stephanie make up the quintet—it’s critical to have a firm grasp on the five personalities. Because they are about to land in so much trouble. Successful artist Finch, the mainstay of Keith’s art gallery, crashes their weekend to everyone’s disgust. Contractors working on the cottage confront Jonathan, demanding their overdue payment immediately. Gangsters are after Keith for his huge drug money debt. A dead body in someone’s bed seems the least of their problems.

Detective Julia Scutt is called out to the scene of a midnight car crash; it’s Derrick’s car, a yet-unidentified murdered man within, and the driver is missing. Scutt has a tough case as the others lie to her, believing they are protecting each other. Besides, Scutt has her own obsession with her sister Jane’s murder, same town, long ago. Everyone enjoys blaming themselves for each predicament they’re in. The weekend scenario unfolds as each participant weighs into the narrative, switching time periods—pay attention―before and after the crash. That includes Alice’s comments from times past when she was in love with Keith, and an unknown person contributing thoughts on the five friends, adding to the killer’s mystery. McCreight has wrought a pleasingly complicated puzzle among so many characters.

Bits

▪ All those times I’d told Alice to grow up and get over Keith, to stop being such a drama queen. (38)

▪ “You know the only reason he wants to hang out with us is because we won’t let him.” (42)

▪ Derrick is a kind person, always has been—even if, in a way, you could say it was his terrible decision at the very end that was the actual key to everything. (47)

▪ Oxy gets into your bones and eats away the marrow. (50-1)

▪ “You have my guys come here and do honest work. We pay up front for all materials and then you don’t pay us?” (79)

▪ “If Finch sniffs out that he’s got something we want, we’ll be screwed.” (126)

▪ “Now I think we’re done, unless maybe you want to help me get my eleven thousand dollars back from those people.” (160)

▪ “I will sue the fucking shit out of you for violating my civil rights. I’ll own this whole town by the time I’m done.” (190)

▪ I already knew none of this was going to work out the way Keith was suggesting. (212)

▪ You do have to feel for Jonathan, living his life to please someone who will never be satisfied.” (262)

▪ “My project is about the costs of blind loyalty and the danger of always accepting people for better and so much worse.” (293)