gilda_elise

In this propulsive locked-room thriller debut, a reunion weekend in the French Alps turns deadly when five friends discover that someone has deliberately stranded them at their remote mountaintop resort during a snow storm.

When Milla accepts an off-season invitation to Le Rocher, a cozy ski resort in the French Alps, she's expecting an intimate weekend of catching up with four old friends. It might have been a decade since she saw them last, but she's never forgotten the bond they forged on this very mountain during a winter spent fiercely training for an elite snowboarding competition.

Yet no sooner do Milla and the others arrive for the reunion than they realize something is horribly wrong. The resort is deserted. The cable cars that delivered them to the mountaintop have stopped working. Their cell phones--missing. And inside the hotel, detailed instructions await them: an icebreaker game, designed to draw out their secrets. A game meant to remind them of Saskia, the enigmatic sixth member of their group, who vanished the morning of the competition years before and has long been presumed dead.

Stranded in the resort, Milla's not sure what's worse: the increasingly sinister things happening around her or the looming snowstorm that's making escape even more impossible. All she knows is that there's no one on the mountain she can trust. Because someone has gathered them there to find out the truth about Saskia...someone who will stop at nothing to get answers. And if Milla's not careful, she could be the next to disappear…

I enjoy stories set in the polar regions, and though this one doesn’t quite make it there, it was close enough, and the cover intriguing enough for me to give it a try. I’m glad I did. It’s a mystery, a type of story that I’m not usually drawn to, but this one did, draw me in that is, and kept me turning the pages.

I don’t know if the sport vernacular was correct; it sounded like it was to me and that was good enough. Luckily, there wasn’t so much of it that it bogged down the story. The thing that almost ruined the story was how little the characters grew in those ten years. Especially Milla, who does some really stupid things as a twenty-something, and is still doing them as a thirty-something. To the point that she’s almost unlikable.

There are plenty of red herrings, so that the ending took me by surprise. Will I read other books by this author, mystery or no? I just might.