'Bright and Deadly Things' (Berkley) by Lexie Elliott.

Mysteries are buried at the top of the world in “Bright and Deadly Things” (Berkley), an atmospherically eerie offering from Scottish author Lexie Elliott (“How to Kill Your Best Friend,” “The French Girl”).

Almost erudite in tone — crafted with purpose for this cast of characters — Elliott’s new novel brings us to the Gothic-esque setting of the Chalet des Anglais through the eyes of Dr. Emily Rivers, a recently widowed, non-medical Oxford don and one of the few scholars and students invited to the rural mountaintop for a university department retreat.

As Elliot advances the eldritch motif, the novel delves deeply into psychological suspense: a student, Sofi, is found dead — accident, murder? — and the clues are as elusive as the electricity, water and access of the rustic chalet.

Once the group is isolated, fraught and tenuous relationships between colleagues heighten Emily’s already heightened anxiety — before ascending the French Alps she missed her initial flight and returned home to find her house had been broken into — and when she learns that there was a connection between her “nerdy” scientist husband and Sofi, questions turn into enigmas and nothing is as it seems.

Trust evaporates, accusations whirl and allies change with the mountain winds as Emily comes to understand that she could easily share Sofi’s fate unless she can connect the past with the present. But commingled with her deep, personal loss — “What might I do at a time when Nick no longer lingers so close to me? Already he is drawing away, or I am drawing away from him? Is it being here that is causing that?” — those links stay stubbornly unchained as Emily’s sense of reality is tested by colleagues who behave in increasingly unusual ways.

Elliott grew up at the foot of the Highlands and earned a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University and these experiences inform her story with a strong sense of place and person. “Bright and Deadly Things” may not be a perfect novel — uneven prose dulls the first half of the story — but it is a chilling, nuanced thriller that ably explores the heights and depths of grief, friendship and greed.