An avalanche closes the only road, a priceless brooch vanishes from the safe, and then the lights go out.
The Hotel Edelweiss is a creaking ski lodge at the top of a Swiss valley, and tonight an avalanche has buried the only road down. By breakfast a diamond brooch has vanished from the lodge safe; by lunch the phone line is cut; by dinner one of the guests is lying at the bottom of the cellar stairs, alive but unconscious, and nobody can say whether they fell. The lodge owner, the ski instructor, the crime novelist, the honeymooner and the off-duty paramedic have three days before the snowplows arrive, and each of them has been somewhere they should not have been.
5 roles. You take one; your friends take the rest, and the narrator plays any left over. Anyone can bring a character of their own into a role instead.
The owner of the Hotel Edelweiss, a fourth-generation hotelier who is losing the place to debt and cannot afford a scandal.
The lodge's handsome, charming ski instructor, who knows the mountain better than anyone and has a past that keeps catching up with him.
A best-selling crime novelist at the lodge for a writing retreat, who is thrilled to finally be inside a real mystery and is behaving appallingly about it.
A newlywed whose spouse vanished on a cross-country ski run the morning of the avalanche and who is trying very hard not to panic.
A paramedic from Johannesburg on her first holiday in five years, who is now the only medical help at the top of a snowbound mountain.