Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Five top winter mysteries & thrillers

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 in the Swiss Alpine town of Crans Montana, the dramatic setting that inspired her novel. Pearse 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.

At CrimeReads she tagged five favorite frozen mysteries and thrillers, including:
The Quality of Silence, by Rosamund Lupton

The Quality of Silence follows a mother and daughter, Yasmin and Ruby, on a journey to find Matt, their missing husband and father as they venture into the snowy wilderness of the Alaskan tundra. Yasmin and Ruby start driving the isolated, icy roads of Alaska desperately searching for answers about Matt’s disappearance, but when a violent storm strikes, they start to fear that someone else might be out there…

Lupton conjures the icy setting so beautifully using wonderfully descriptive prose that really evokes the bleakness of an Alaskan winter. Page by page, you feel a chill setting in as the tension ramps in this haunting, suspenseful read.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue