19. Shiver by Allie Reynolds

listened on Audible

narrated by Olivia Vinall (enjoyable)
Unabridged audio (10:22)
2021
432 pgs.
Contemporary "Locked Room" Mystery
Finished 3/6/21
Goodreads rating: 3.89 -4498 ratings
My rating: 3.5
Setting: Contemporary off-season ski resort in the French Alps

First line/s: "It's that time of year again.  The time the glacier gives up bodies."

My comments: This was definitely a different, interesting plot  Five friends/acquaintances have been summonsed anonymously to the same snowboard training center on a glacier in the Alps where they had met ten years previously when they wer training for the British snowboard championships.  It's all a big mystery about who has summonsed them....someone is trying to solve the mystery of what happened to Curtis's sister, Saskia, who disappeared during that time.  Mila tells the story in the first person and flips back-and-forth from the present to the time before, melding the two stories into one so that we discover, slowly, what had happened that winter.  The tension rises when their phones are stolen, the electricity keeps going out, there's a storm coming, and there's no way to get back down to the bottom of the moutain.  Definite tension.  Lots of talk about snowboarding, glaciers, tricks and moves that didn't really interest me, but on the whole it was pretty decent storytelling.  Enjoyed the narrations.

Goodreads synopsis:  In this propulsive locked-room thriller debut, a reunion weekend in the French Alps turns deadly when five friends discover that someone has deliberately stranded them at their remote mountaintop resort during a snowstorm.
          When Milla accepts an off-season invitation to Le Rocher, a cozy ski resort in the French Alps, she's expecting an intimate weekend of catching up with four old friends. It might have been a decade since she saw them last, but she's never forgotten the bond they forged on this very mountain during a winter spent fiercely training for an elite snowboarding competition.
          Yet no sooner do Milla and the others arrive for the reunion than they realize something is horribly wrong. The resort is deserted. The cable cars that delivered them to the mountaintop have stopped working. Their cell phones--missing. And inside the hotel, detailed instructions await them: an icebreaker game, designed to draw out their secrets. A game meant to remind them of Saskia, the enigmatic sixth member of their group, who vanished the morning of the competition years before and has long been presumed dead.
          Stranded in the resort, Milla's not sure what's worse: the increasingly sinister things happening around her or the looming snowstorm that's making escape even more impossible. All she knows is that there's no one on the mountain she can trust. Because someone has gathered them there to find out the truth about Saskia...someone who will stop at nothing to get answers. And if Milla's not careful, she could be the next to disappear...