The Sanatorium

"It’s a similar setup, but it’s a darker book. The sanatorium location was once an actual sanatorium. It’s now a beautiful luxury resort, but given the name, and the history of it, there are some darker secrets hiding. Again, those come to light. What I really liked about The Sanatorium was that locked room, isolated setting — in a hotel that nobody can reach. Something terrible happens. There’s an awful storm. Everybody’s locked in the resort. And we have our protagonist who has a window of time to unearth the answers to some questions before even more terrible things happen. I love the landscape as well. Catherine Cooper’s books I’ve mentioned are set in beautiful, scenic French countryside. With The Sanatorium it’s bleak and dark. Whilst it’s beautiful, there’s an edge to it. It’s not just a luxurious retreat. It’s really cold. You feel that if you stepped outside, terrible things would happen if you stayed there too long. It doesn’t have that holiday resort feel. Yes, absolutely, I love that. There are actual locked room mysteries — like some by Agatha Christie where the body is found in a room , but the room is locked from the inside and nobody could have got in or out. But sometimes when we say ‘locked room’ what we really mean is a very closed environment where somebody in the party must be guilty of the murder. In The Sanatorium , you have a group of suspects and various kinds of secrets come into play. In one chapter, you suspect one person; in another, you suspect somebody else. It’s just brilliant. You unearth individual histories and backstories. I like that feeling of being suspended and held and then surprised. It’s a real pleasure to be taken along and guess the real murderer, feeling like you’re your own Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. I’ve gone for the loose locked room feel, so there isn’t a body in a room with the key locked inside. It is on a ship of 3000 — a hugely glamorous luxury liner. However, I’ve got a very small cast, and because of their VIP status, they have access to parts of the ship that nobody else does. My protagonist is meeting her friend whom she hasn’t spoken to for three years for reasons that come to light during the novel. Her friend has married a billionaire who owns the cruise liner and it’s on its inaugural cruise. They’re on the most luxurious ship with very rich people, and yet when terrible things begin to happen, it begins to feel claustrophobic. There are some very claustrophobic settings which act like locked rooms. For example, I have a scene where something terrible happens when they’re all shut in a karaoke booth — one of them in the booth is responsible for a crime, but which one? I really enjoyed writing it. It was such a blast. I call it a cruise because it’s nice and easy but technically it’s a crossing — because the ship sails out of Portsmouth Harbour and goes to New York. The inaugural cruise is five nights and six days—from Portsmouth to New York—and that’s when everything happens. We do have a very brief spell in New York and a brief spell at Portsmouth before we set off, but it all happens aboard the ship. It’s isolated. There may or may not be a storm at some point. There is another voice in the novel from three years earlier – her scenes don’t take place on the ship."