Sarah Pearse Books in Order

Sarah Pearse grew up in Devon, England, and the coast is still home. She lives by the sea in South Devon with her husband and two daughters. Before she wrote suspense novels, she studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and later completed a postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism. Her early ambitions pointed in this direction: as a child, she wrote stories and made amateur newspapers.

Her route into publishing took some turns. Pearse worked first in procurement and then in brand PR for a multinational company, but she kept writing alongside the day job. She had studied writing already, yet spent time living and working before attempting full-length fiction. A move to Switzerland in her twenties brought her close to the Alps and gave her the setting that would one day shape her first novel.

The writing habit became more serious when she was on maternity leave.

With a young child asleep nearby, Pearse began making time for short fiction. Her early stories appeared in magazines and were shortlisted for competitions, useful proof that the work might find readers outside her desk drawer. She has said that this stretch of writing gave her confidence to try a novel. There was an earlier manuscript that did not make it to publication, but the experience helped her learn how to build the next one.

That next project was The Sanatorium, the thriller that introduced detective Elin Warner. Pearse drew on time spent exploring around Crans-Montana and on research into the area's sanatorium history. She turned those ideas into Le Sommet, an unnervingly sleek hotel in the Swiss Alps, where a storm and a disappearance leave Elin with very few people to trust.

A beautiful holiday setting is rarely safe for long.

The Elin Warner novels use places that are hard to leave: a mountain hotel in The Sanatorium, a wellness retreat on a Devon island in The Retreat, and a national park in Portugal in The Wilds. Pearse pairs those enclosed or remote settings with missing people, old secrets, and families carrying unresolved hurt. Elin's cases also keep returning to questions of memory, grief, trust, and the ways the past can follow a person into a new place.

The debut became a number-one Sunday Times bestseller, a New York Times bestseller, and a Reese's Book Club pick. It also won Crime Book of the Year at the 2022 Fingerprint Awards. The Retreat also reached the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists, and her books have sold more than a million copies across more than 30 countries.

Pearse continues to live in South Devon, close to the sea that has framed much of her life. Her published books form a completed Elin Warner trilogy, and she is working on a fourth novel, described as a standalone thriller. The locations may change, but the pull remains the same: a gorgeous place, an uneasy history, and nowhere easy to hide.