‘On a dark, snowy and stormy night just like this one’: you yearn to pick up a locked-room, snowbound thriller, even if it’s summer.
One where the characters are scared and isolated, with a killer in the shadows.
So you sit in your darkly lit reading room, whether it’s your living room, bedroom, or reading nook, where the low, cozy, red ambient light you turn on casts the perfect haunting light and shadows.
You power on your television, and the fake yet surreal YouTube fireplace roars with wind sounds, as if the outside wind is trying to get in (and maybe it actually is). Unless, of course, you have a real fireplace (How lucky!).
It’s dark outside, and you can see the heavy snow consuming the view outside, or you imagine it while escaping into your book landscape. You want to be there at a beautiful resort in the mountains, so you read about it instead.
And you can’t decide: which book am I going to read? Or am I going to read all of them?
I’ll list them in the order I read them and try to avoid spoilers, just mentioning the premises of these thrilling stories.
The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
View on Amazon.com I really loved The Hunting Party by
Lucy Foley! It was my husband’s recommendation, as he loved it too.
A group of friends reunite at a hunting lodge (The Loch Corrin Estate) in the vast wilderness in the Highlands of Scotland over Christmas break to bring in the New Year: a tradition since they were students at Oxford ten years ago.
Horrifyingly, one friend is found dead on New Year’s Day, and the group try to navigate this murder mystery while being secluded from the outside world and with chaos ascending, snow falling and moods heightening; the group unravels.
The viewpoints shift between characters, allowing the reader to see each character’s perspective and backstory.
Dead of Winter by Darcey Coates
View on Amazon.comI thoroughly enjoyed Dead of Winter by Darcy Coates. This was a thrilling page-turner for me, and I read it in two days.
Love the cover, which made me want to read it when I first saw it in my daughter’s collection. She usually has physical copies, and I’ll read from Kindle, but I had to try this one out when I saw the cover and description!
In the story, Christa, burdened by a traumatic past event, is with her boyfriend, Kiernan, and they are heading to a retreat in the Rocky Mountains.
The story kicks off from the get-go when their bus, amongst a group of strangers, gets stranded on the road that leads to the resort due to a “fallen” tree they can’t pass (are we in Fromville?!).
Too far from the resort, they all head to an isolated cabin they find nearby in the woods and end up trapped there by a brutal snowstorm outside.
Gruesome deaths occur while they struggle to survive the weather, the landscape and whoever is trying to pick them off one by one.
An Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena
View on Amazon.comAn Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena sets the perfect stage for a dream getaway at a mountain lodge in the Catskills of New York: with snowbased activities outside or just for lounging in the warmer indoors.
Have you ever seen Gilmore Girls and The Dragonfly Inn?
I originally envisioned that charming inn (but in the dark), with the lobby, library, kitchen, dining, sitting areas, and stairs (no doubt because I was co-watching it with my daughter at the time).
However, Mitchell’s Inn ends up much bigger and darker than that, but still as beautiful (more so in my mind) and full of real wood charm, with fireplaces, beautiful stairs and intricate newel posts.
With a raging blizzard outside, an electrical outage and deadly circumstances, different couples try to determine whether the first death is accidental or nefarious.
Lapena gives you narratives from different character perspectives. I just loved this book!
One by One by Ruth Ware
View on Amazon.comOne By One by Ruth Ware is also one of my favourite snowbound thrillers!
A group of people, all connected through work in a London-based app company, visit a luxurious remote ski resort in the French Alps for a work retreat and some skiing on the side.
Snowstorms and avalanches cut them off from the outside world, and their stay takes a turn for the worse when a teammate doesn’t return from skiing.
You get two perspectives in this book and need to figure out the killer before it’s too late.
The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse
View on Amazon.comThe Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse, which is also a Reese’s Book Club pick, takes place in the Swiss Alps in a former sanatorium, now a renovated hotel (Le Sommet) with an interesting history, and only accessible by a narrow road that gets closed off after a threatening storm.
It is written in third-person (“she/her”) perspective, following the main character, Detective Elin Warner (on long-term work leave in the UK), who is with her boyfriend, Will, attending her estranged brother’s engagement party (Isaac).
His fiancée, Laure, is a childhood friend of Elin’s. The anxiety starts to build at the beginning of the trip to this hotel (with this awful road for me!). At the same time, her past and recent trauma collide with mysterious circumstances when a series of missing people and deaths occur.
Whiteout by Ken Follett
View on Amazon.comWhiteout by Ken Follett takes place over a blizzard on Christmas Eve after a breach in security of a deadly virus from a lab in Scotland, when a rabbit is removed from the premises and later, the theft of the virus.
I was hoping it would be more apocalyptic, with a pandemic on our hands during a snowstorm, but it’s more about discovering and preventing the outbreak and trying to survive.
It does involve snow, but it’s not as big a factor as I was hoping, and the last scenes are about surviving in a remote family house belonging to the CEO of the research lab at Christmas.
It does involve a few locations, being the family house, the lab, and the travel in between, so it might not fall super neatly in the locked room category.
A subplot involves the main female lead, Toni Gallo, the lab’s security director, who is developing feelings for her older boss/CEO. I recall not really liking that dynamic, and I don’t think the book really needed it, but that connection does happen.
Overall, I’m still glad I read it.
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
View on Amazon.comMurder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie has been spoiled for me via one of my favourite comedies, Corner Gas, however it is an older story, and I love the show, so I’ll allow it!
It’s been on my ‘To Read List’ for a while. There’s a murder, and the characters are confined to a train that has to come to a stop and becomes snowbound.
Be warned, there is some French content in the book, but not much, and you might be able to figure it out via the context. It is mostly conversational and small talk.
I did find myself losing track of what happened during each character’s recount of their alibis after a guest is found dead, as there are a lot of characters and details. I don’t think it mattered, as it made sense as it went on.
You also get an amazing movie adaptation to watch after!
And now I really want to take a trip on one of these trains! I looked at some in the highlands of Scotland, but they are quite pricey and would seem hard to hit your daily step count.
The Writing Retreat by Julie Bartz
View on Amazon.comThe Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz was recommended to me by my daughter when I was looking for some more locked-room, snowbound thrillers to scratch an itch after reading through the ones above!
In this book, a small group of writers wins a contest. They are invited to attend a month-long retreat (almost Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft-esque, with the creation of Frankenstein) hosted by famous feminist horror author Roza Vallo at her remote estate, where they are dropped the bomb that they need to write a novel while they are there.
The narration follows Alex, who learns that her former best friend (with a sexual past) will also be attending the retreat. It starts with drama, anxiety, potential ghosts, and eerie happenings, leading to a missing guest during a snowstorm that traps them inside.
All while they must try to write under fear, while also appeasing Roza and her activities and figuring out what’s going on and fighting to survive.
My Next Breath by Jeremy Renner
View on Amazon.com In terms of non-fiction, the closest I’ve read (well, listened to) was Jeremy Renner’s My Next Breath memoir.
It recounts his horrific experience and incredible survival after being run over by a Snowcat snowplow: crushing him almost to death after a massive snow storm at his home near Lake Tahoe in Nevada, USA dubbed Camp Renner.
The accident happens during the Christmas and New Year holidays, so almost all neighbours are away (and Camp Renner is quite a distance away), which adds to the struggle in his isolated, snowbound location.
If you have any suggestions for similar books, I’ll need more to read and would love to hear them!
Leave them in the comments below!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janise is a Book Notification Book Specialist and is based in Ontario. She loves long reads on the beach, hot tubbing with a Kindle, and listening to audiobooks while she works on home upgrade projects. She doesn't like wrestling but will provide company at a live show with her husband and read during the brutal bits. Her love of reading started with Sweet Valley Twins, Fear Street, VC Andrews, then Lee Child and she is now trying to read more classics and loves anything
sci-fi, time travel, apocalyptic, dystopian and gothic horror.