I liked Pearse’s first book – ‘The Sanatorium’ – because of the claustrophobic atmosphere and the edge-of-your-seat tension levels. I had high hopes for this book, ‘The Retreat’, as this marks the return of detective Elin Warner in a different but equally remote setting.
This book is set on an island off the Devon coast which has been made into a wellness getaway. The island has a sinister past – a school with a dodgy history, the creepy ‘Reaper’s Rock’ and a series of brutal murders – but that hasn’t stopped the LUMEN developers from making it a luxury retreat. When an accident happens at the resort – a fatal fall from the island’s yoga pavilion – DS Elin Warner is called in to investigate. Struggling with her own past trauma, she begins to uncover some of the island’s deadly secrets as both the tension and the bodies begin to stack up…
Pearse, as with her first novel, manages the tension of the setting brilliantly – what starts out as a luxurious guest experience soon becomes a nightmare because of the events and the inhospitable weather moving in. The island is remote and cut off from the mainland – all the better to host a potential serial killer.
It was also good to see DS Elin Warner again – I liked ‘The Sanitorium’ but felt she could be more developed as a character and here she is! I liked that she stepped up to investigate in this book – she wasn’t the default detective on site, but insisted she was up to the job even though she was still working through her own troubles. She also had a personal link to the island as her husband, Will, was on the design team and his sister, Farrah, worked there – this made the stakes feel higher with regards to what was happening.
The key guests on the island – centring around a family group – were much harder to like! There were a fair few sisters and husbands/partners, plus a cousin, and I did sometimes forget who was who. Some of them were quite unsympathetically portrayed – although none of this stopped me from engaging with their stories, their secrets and lies.
I liked the more investigative/police procedural elements of the novel best – there are some great little twists in there, including at least one revelation that really threw my amateur detecting. There’s some sections of the book where Elin is going it alone when I felt that the tension was unbearably high. As usual, I suspected everyone and didn’t see the final denouement until it came – exactly as it should be.
I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoys a well-managed, tense and atmospheric thriller with a solid police procedural at its heart. I was pleased to meet Elin Warner again, but I also think that new readers to the series wouldn’t struggle to follow the story without having read ‘The Sanitorium’. I think I liked this second instalment better than the first and I’m looking forward to book three.
Thanks to NetGalley for my copy of the book and sorry for how long the review has taken!
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Header photo by Valentina Sotnikova on Unsplash
