Review: The Chalet by Catherine Cooper

Four friends. One luxury getaway. The perfect murder.

French Alps, 1998

Two young men ski into a blizzard… but only one returns.

20 years later

Four people connected to the missing man find themselves in that same resort. Each has a secret. Two may have blood on their hands. One is a killer-in-waiting.

Someone knows what really happened that day.

And somebody will pay.

Review

The Chalet by Catherine Cooper turned out to be an entertaining, fast-paced mystery. Told through alternating timelines and narrators, it is a story about a ski accident that occurred in 1998 and the effects that it had on a group of people 2 decades later. Will and his brother, Adam, went on a ski trip to the French Alps. Only 1 brother left the mountains. What happened to the other 1?

This was a clever mystery that kept me on my toes with so many questions running through my mind. With 1 timeline set in 1998 and another in 2020, I kept trying to guess the connection between the 2. The author went a step further and threw in an anonymous narrator with a complete different timeline. My mind was running wild with assumptions. I found myself thinking about the story and trying to guess the connections even when I was not reading the book. The reveal was brilliant!

The character development is this story was quite well done. I totally despised some of the characters, empathized with others and even liked some. They weren’t too many to get the story muddled up and the way they were crafted ensured that they all stood out in a way.

I truly enjoyed reading this book. I had to pause a couple of times to Google words such as Salopetes and spent quite a bit of time looking at images of luxurious chalets. Overall, my experience with this book was simply brilliant.