Ten great books set in ski resorts

19th January 2021

Ski resorts are great places set all sorts of fiction from heady romances to crime thrillers. Here are ten of our favourite books set in ski resorts on both sides of the Atlantic

One by One by Ruth Ware – FRENCH ALPS

Snow is falling in the exclusive alpine ski resort of Saint Antoine, as the shareholders and directors of Snoop, the hottest new music app, gather for a make or break corporate retreat to decide the future of the company. At stake is a billion-dollar dot com buyout that could make them all millionaires, or leave some of them out in the cold.

The clock is ticking on the offer, and with the group irrevocably split, tensions are running high. When an avalanche cuts the chalet off from help, and one board member goes missing in the snow, the group is forced to ask – would someone resort to murder, to get what they want?

Snow Waste by Michael E Bemis – MAINE

Paralleling the modern day struggle between corporate America and the environmental movement, which is increasingly becoming violent, Snow Waste demystifies a ski resort’s future success and a paper mill’s resolve to survive by exacerbating perennial land and water use issues.

Set in fictional Cannon, Maine: Joe Littlefield is the chief of snowmaking for the White Woods Ski Resort. His boss is Warren Ainsworth is really focussed on developing Carter Peak, which would make White Wood one of the largest ski resorts in this part of the country. And Doug Andrews is an environmental activist, with it has to be said, a past, and has been living in Maine now for 5 years.  The story is told through the eyes of these three people, and with a good, well thought out story, you too can experience what potentially goes on behind the scenes of a ski resort.

Chalet Girl plays Cupid by Lorraine Wilson – VERBIER

A match made on the slopes…

After a messy break up that’s left her homeless, jobless and single, temporary chalet girl Emily needs a fresh start! So when best friend Holly asks her to help out before the start of the winter season at the exclusive Chalet Repos in Verbier, Emily jumps at the chance. What broken heart can’t be fixed by après ski cocktails?

Verbier seems like the perfect escape, until Emily meets super-sexy and darkly brooding winter athlete Jake. She’s meant to be avoiding men at all costs, but the spark between her and Jake is sizzling! As she finds herself increasingly left alone with Jake, Emily begins to wonder if Cupid has paid a visit to Chalet Repos…!

The Little Swiss Ski Chalet by Julie Caplin – SWISS ALPS

It’s time to pack your bags and head to the breathtaking, snow-covered peaks of the Swiss Alps for velvety hot chocolates, delicious cheeses and a gorgeous love story…

Food technician Mina has always believed that chocolate will solve everything – and it’s just what she needs when her latest relationship mishap goes viral!

So with her bags packed and a new determination to sort her life out, Minna decides to drown her sorrows with the best hot chocolate in the world at her godmother’s cosy Swiss chalet. Chocolate: yes. Romance: no. Until she has a run in on an Alpine train with a mysterious but oh-so-gorgeous stranger…

The Chalet by Catherine Cooper – FRENCH ALPS

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.

Christmas under the Stars by Karen Swan – BANFF

In the snow-topped mountains of the Canadian Rockies, Meg and Mitch are living their dream. Just weeks away from their wedding, they work and play with Tuck and Lucy, their closest and oldest friends. Meg and Lucy are as close as sisters – much to Meg’s sister’s dismay – and Tuck and Mitch have successfully turned their passion for snowboarding into a booming business.

But when a polar storm hits, tragedy strikes. Alone in the tiny mountain log cabin she shares with Mitch, Meg desperately tries to radio for help – and it comes from the most unexpected quarter, a lone voice across the airwaves that sees what she cannot.

As the snow melts and they try to live with their loss, the friendship Meg thought was forever is buckled by tensions, rivalries and devastating secrets. Nothing is as she thought and only her radio contact understands what it is to be truly alone. As they share confidences in the dark, witnessed only by the stars, Meg feels her future begin to pull away from her past and is forced to consider a strange truth – is it her friends who are the strangers? And a stranger who really knows her best?

The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse – CRANS MONTANA

EVERYONE’S IN DANGER. ANYONE COULD BE NEXT.

An imposing, isolated hotel, high up in the Swiss Alps, is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But she’s taken time off from her job as a detective, so when she receives an invitation out of the blue to celebrate her estranged brother’s recent engagement, she has no choice but to accept.

Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge. Though it’s beautiful, something about the hotel, recently converted from an abandoned sanatorium, makes her nervous – as does her brother, Isaac.

And when they wake the following morning to discover his fiancée Laure has vanished without a trace, Elin’s unease grows. With the storm cutting off access to and from the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the remaining guests start to panic.

But no-one has realized yet that another woman has gone missing. And she’s the only one who could have warned them just how much danger they’re all in . . .

Fade to White by Wendy Clinch – VERMONT

Snow isn’t the only white powder falling on Spruce Peak when Stacey Curtis returns in Fade to White, her second Ski Diva mystery. Hollywood has-been Harper Stone arrives in Stacey’s little Vermont town to shoot a mouthwash commercial, and he’s anything but happy about the downward spiral his career has taken. When the ornery actor turns up dead a few days later—and the last person to see him alive turns out to be Brian Russell, Stacey’s jealous ex-fiancé—things start getting complicated. Hollywood has come to the Green Mountains, and you’ll want to hold on tight—because in this fast-paced sequel to Wendy Clinch’s Double Black, everything’s going downhill fast.

Skiing the Edge by Jules Older – NORTH AMERICA

The wildest true tales by the greatest ski and snowboard writers. Tales of jail, of humiliation, of skiing through gunfire, snowboarding through pain, getting crushed by avalanche, threatened by authorities, and nearly killing a couple of high-roller ski students from Hong Kong.

Here’s how it started… On October 19, an email arrived from a ski writer/ski buddy who had managed to get himself remanded into a seriously uncomfortable night in the drunk tank in lovely Whistler, British Columbia.

His emailed confession was the embodiment of humiliation. It was also the embodiment of my favorite kind of ski writing – personal, quirky, compelling. I thought, I would kill to publish this thing.

That’s when the light bulb lit. I can publish this thing, and a lot of other things I love to read. I’ll create an eBook. A ski eBook.
That day, I contacted North America’s best ski writers. Here’s what I told them:

” I’m finding the central, unifying theme hard to describe, but it’s a lot like Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography: ‘I know it when I see it.’ Stories have to be personal. Have to be revealing. Can be embarrassing. And must be brilliantly written. The key word is intense: intensely funny, tragic, exciting – intense.

Another Long Day on the Piste by Will Randall – FRENCH ALPS

Writer, adventurer, ex-teacher and veteran of umpteen travel disasters, Will Randall has fallen off donkeys in Spain and out of canoes in the Solomon Islands, but none of this has prepared him for a disastrous season as a ski-bum with a posse of raucous, hard-drinking ex-students.

Dismally unfashionable and hopeless at skiing, Randal finds that his stay in the charming Alpine backwater of mont St Bernard brings a whole host of new opportunities for domestic catastrophe, romantic rejection and public humiliation, including a stint as a chalet girl and an encounter with a Russian oligarch and his hair-raising entourage.

Wry, self-deprecating and deliriously funny, ANOTHER LONG DAY ON THE PISTE is a rollercoaster of a travel adventure and essential apres-ski reading.

Enjoy your ski resort reading!

Charlotte and Tony for the TripFiction team

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