Spoilers and Plot Summary for the Sanatorium

Did you read The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse and have ALL the questions about the ending? And what’s with that epilogue – who is following Elin around the Sanatorium? Come check out my spoilers and plot summary for The Sanatorium and then let’s discuss this baffling case of multiple murders in a Swiss alps resort and the equally baffling ending! Check out this Spoilers and Plot Summary for the Sanatorium!

The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse. Published February 2, 2021 by Pamela Dornan Books.

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The plot summary below will contain spoilers. If you want to read my spoiler free review of The Sanatorium, you can find it here.

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THE SPOILERS AND PLOT SUMMARY FOR THE SANATORIUM

• Plot Summary for the Sanatorium
• Who was the killer in the Sanatorium?
• WHAT WAS THAT FINAL CHAPTER? The Sanatorium ending, explained — or at least the possibilities explored!
• BREAKING NEWS: Yes, there will be a sequel to The Sanatorium. Elin will be back! Will we find out who’s is stalking her? Maybe not…

Spoilers and Plot Summary for the Sanatorium by Sarah Pearce

Elin and Will arrive at Le Sommet, a resort in the Swiss Alps. She’s a British police officer and they are meeting her brother, Isaac, and his partner Laure. Elin and Laure knew each other growing up, and now Laure is the assistant manager at Le Sommet and she and Isaac are engaged.

Adele, a hotel cleaner at Le Sommet, finds a copper bracelet outside one of the rooms. When she leaves work she is attacked by someone in a gas mask.

Isaac and Laure show Elin and Will around the hotel. They point out Lucas Carron, the hotel owner and his sister Cecile, who helps manage the resort. They mention that the hotel’s architect, Daniel, was a friend of the Carron siblings who disappeared while the hotel was being planned.

The next morning Isaac says he can’t find Laure. Then a skiier discovers the body of Daniel, the missing architect.

Elin talks to Isaac about where Laure could be.

Elin also tells her brother about a case that is preoccupying her: the murder of two teenage girls. An anonymous tip led the police to a suspect: Mark Hayler. Elin went to question him and he ran. She chased him along the beach and into the surf and he hit her with a rock and got away. After that, she took a leave from work.

Elin sees what she thinks is blood on the rug in Isaac and Laure’s room, but Isaac says Laure cut herself shaving.

Elin seems slightly suspicious that Isaac has something to do with Laure’s disappearance. She tells Will that she thinks Isaac might have killed their brother Sam, who drowned when Sam was eight, Elin was twelve, and Isaac was ten.

Sam’s death was ruled an accident, but Elin has had flashbacks about seeing Isaac with blood on his hands.

This plot point will be important later:

Will convinces Elin to try to relax at the spa. As Elin leaves the pool area alone, someone pushes her from behind into a freezing outdoor plunge pool. Flashing back to Sam’s death, she panics but manages to climb out. Will tells her she must have slipped.

The resort is evacuated due to the storm and avalanche risk. Isaac refuses to leave as Laure is still missing. Adele is found dead in the pool.

Due to a small avalanche blocking the road, the police can’t come, so Elin secures the scene and collects evidence on their behalf.

People tell Elin that Laure and Cecile seemed at odds. Lucas confesses that he and Laure had a short fling and that he had been receiving anonymous, threatening notes.

Someone wiped much of the resort’s CCTV footage, but there is footage showing that Laure was following Elin at the spa. She wonders if Laure is the one who pushed her and is also the killer of Adele and Daniel. Files from Laure’s computer reveal that Laure was providing information to a journalist on an expose on the resort.

Laure texts Elin asking to meet. Instead, Elin finds Laure’s body. They also find a flash drive and a copper bracelet at the scene. The hotel CCTV cameras are down and the weather is still too bad for the police to get to them. Elin thinks Lucas and Cecile are acting strangely.

Elin connects numbers engraved on the copper bracelets to some old medical files on the flash drive.

Another hotel employee, Margot, goes missing. Elin tracks her phone within the hotel and she and Will go looking for her. Margot escapes and Will gets stabbed.

Isaac and Elin discuss Sam’s death. Isaac says it was an accident and that Elin was the one with him at the time.  Elin finally remembers the details of her brother’s death and in doing so recalls that Margot dropped something when she was struggling with Will.

She finds what Margot dropped – an envelope with old medical records and gruesome old photos of medical experiments on women.  One entry has the same number as the copper bracelet. Elin suggests that Margot was avenging the deaths of five relatives who were sanatorium patients in the 1920s.

Elin finds a secret tunnel. She and Lucas go to investigate and find the killer’s lair. Margot is there, injured and dying. She turns to Lucas to say that Margot was working with someone else, but Lucas has disappeared.

Elin goes to Cecile for help and they search Lucas’s office for clues. Cecile confesses that Daniel’s body was actually found in the hotel but that Lucas dumped it so as not to get bad publicity.

SPOILERS: Who was the killer in the Sanatorium?

After talking to Ceclie, Elin realizes who the killer is. She rushes to the pool area where she finds Lucas, injured.

The killer is … CECILE. When Cecile was sixteen, Daniel raped her. Lucas knew and did nothing. The rape destroyed Cecile’s life. She became pregnant as a result. Terminating that pregnancy left her unable to have children.

Margot contacted Lucas and Cecile about her relatives who had been treated and abused at the clinic in the 1920s. Lucas buried the information as it would have been bad publicity for the resort.

Cecile then killed Adele because Adele helped Lucas cover up Daniel’s murder.

Cecile enlisted Margot’s help in murdering Laure. She killed Laure because Laure found out what Cecile was doing and threatened to expose her.

Cecile wanted to get caught for Daniel’s murder so she could “tell her story.”

Cecile and Lucas struggle and fall in the pool. Elin watches, terrified and thinking about the day her brother died. But she jumps in and saves Lucas. The police arrest Cecile and Lucas. 

Do you think Cecile’s motivation for killing Laure and Adele made sense?

I can accept that Cecile waited years and years to get her revenge. She killed Daniel, who raped her. But then she killed Adele because Adele helped Lucas hide Daniel’s body, which meant that Cecile got away with murder. She wanted to get caught to get her story out.

Then she killed Laure, and then was going to kill Lucas, and I guess Elin would have been next? I don’t know – it was all a bit farfetched for me. Personally, I liked Margot as the killer a lot better. I guess she was helping Cecile, but still.

What WAS that final chapter of The Sanatorium? The Sanatorium Ending Explained (or not!)

In the epilogue of The Sanatorium, Elin and Will finally leave the hotel but as they board the funicular, someone follows them, someone who admits HE (or she?) was the one who pushed Elin into the plunge pool.

Was it Isaac, Elin’s brother, meaning he was the one who killed Sam?

Was it Hayler, the guy from Elin’s case back home? Is he now going to kill Elin? WTF?

Or was it someone else following her? (Be sure to check out the comments and decide if you are Team Isaac or Team Hayler or Team Someone Else. What do you think?

Yes! Elin is BACK in a sequel to The Sanatorium

So some of us in comments thought that, given that weird last chapter, there had to be a next book.

Good news: we may just find out who was following Elin.

Bad news: if you didn’t like Elin before (and there are a lot of people in comments who didn’t) she’s back in the next book.

Here’s the synopsis of The Retreat.

An eco-wellness retreat has opened on an island off the English coast, promising rest and relaxation—but the island itself, known locally as Reaper’s Rock, has a dark past. Once the playground of a serial killer, it’s rumored to be cursed.

Detective Elin Warner is called to the retreat when a young woman’s body is found on the rocks below the yoga pavilion in what seems to be a tragic fall. But the victim wasn’t a guest—she wasn’t meant to be on the island at all.

When a guest drowns in a diving incident the following day, Elin starts to suspect that there’s nothing accidental about these deaths. But why would someone target the guests, and who else is in danger? Elin must find the killer—before the island’s history starts to repeat itself.

Sounds familiar, right? Luxury resort with a dark past and Elin on the case! Elin does seem to find a lot of bodies in expensive wellness retreats.

Here is my Review of the Retreat and when you’ve read it (or if you don’t want to read it and just want ALL the spoilers) come over to my Spoiler Discussion for the Retreat!

Insights About Elin From Sarah Pearse

Also I recently listened to a podcast featuring Sarah Pearse, and I am here to say she seems LOVELY. I would love to have a cup of tea with her!

Here are some insights for those of you who aren’t fans of Elin (she didn’t bother me nearly as much as she did some of you lol. But I do get where you are coming from and so does Sarah!)

Sarah said she didn’t want the book to be a police procedural. She wanted Elin to be a “normal” person. (She is a police officer, but I she’s guess off-duty and out of her element in a different country.)

Sarah also seems aware that Elin is “somewhat controversial” and “perhaps a little intense” and I loved that she didn’t get defensive about it. A lot of authors would have been offended.

In the podcast, Sarah had some interesting thoughts about how female detectives in police procedurals get pigeonholed into a very masculine sort of characterization and wanted to try to work against that.

She also hinted that in book two Elin will have to reckon with her own memory and how reliable it is. IS ELIN SAM’S KILLER? Will she have to arrest herself? Anything seems possible!

Talk to me in comments! What were your thoughts about this one? That did you think about the ending of the sanatorium? I have seen varied opinions! And be sure subscribe to comment replies – you can subscribe to all comment replies or just to the replies on your individual comment.

Join the Spoiler Discussion for the Sanatorium!

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