The Chalet

Catherine Cooper sets The Chalet in the French Alps with two timelines twenty years apart. In 1998, two young men go off-piste in the snow and only one comes back. In 2018, four couples arrive at a luxury chalet for a week of skiing, unaware that the reasons their week has gone wrong have roots in the older event.

Cooper paces the dual timeline carefully. The reader pieces together what happened in 1998 alongside the contemporary characters, who are themselves slowly realizing how much they don’t know about each other.

The Alpine setting is one of the book’s pleasures. Cooper or her sources clearly know the world of luxury chalet vacations, and the small-class anxieties of the modern characters give the book its texture.

For readers who liked Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party or Ruth Ware’s One by One, this is in the same neighborhood. Snowbound thriller territory done well.