Retreat by Krysten Ritter

Format: eBook
Read: August 2025

Yes, that Krysten Ritter. The actress known for Jessica Jones, Don’t Trust The B* in Apartment 23, Gia from Veronica Mars, and a million other things she’s always brilliant in, and I love her. This is her second novel, the first one was called Bonfire, which I read years ago and quite enjoyed, and so I thought I’d give this a go too for 99p!

Bonfire was a pretty good small-town mystery detective thriller. It was nothing to get excited about in either storytelling or writing, but it had some neat twists, felt grounded, and I thought that the main character was relatable, as I recall. I had a pretty good time with it. I have read a lot worse! I believe Krysten wrote that one herself during a 15-month break between filming Jessica Jones and The Defenders; she talks about why she wrote the book and the process in this interview (also, this interview has me so hyped again for JJ to return in Daredevil!).

Retreat is explicitly co-authored by Lindsay Jamieson, I imagine, because Krysten is too busy with acting jobs. I am tempted to go back and look at Bonfire to see if the writing feels different, but I don’t really have the time for that right now! This novel is a straight thriller, and the main character is a con woman who is neither relatable nor likeable! The writing is again rather basic and uninspired, but I didn’t think it was ever bad and, again, I have read worse! The plot is pretty wild, and the characters are very flat and stereotypical rich people as you might see on Real Housewives, and I’d say the whole vibe, for me, was leaning towards camp rather than serious thriller!

I did immediately guess how the story was going to turn out, but I was still completely invested in finding out if I was right, and how it was all going to resolve! I found the resolution satisfying, even if I had predicted everything, because it was well plotted. The story is twisty, I just have watched and read a lot of this kind of thing, so I can often pick out the twists! I think the fast pace helped to keep me in the story, even when I was getting frustrated by the main character being a dumb bitch and not questioning some of the highly suspicious events that take place!

The main character does make a lot of stupid mistakes, she is not a smart as she thinks she is (but that is kind of the point!). She’s not likeable at all, even if she is praying on greedy rich people, she’s still living off abusing people’s trust. There is an attempt to give her a background motivation and definition, but it’s very clumsy, uninspired, and I didn’t find it convincing. I didn’t really care about that, though; the fact I didn’t like or care about her didn’t affect my enjoyment because I just wanted to figure out the mystery!

Perhaps because I know the author is an actress – and also the physical description of the main character basically is Krysten Ritter – I really pictured this whole book as a campy, trashy (in a fun way) movie – and maybe the idea for this did start as a script for a movie or TV show (like with Bonfire). I think there are a number of scenes in this that would work a lot better filmed than they do on the page, and the ending in particular felt extremely cinematic.

Still, like I said, I had a good time with this! I flew through it and stayed up too late reading a few nights. If you want an easy popcorn thriller to read, then you could do a lot worse than this! I’ve been heading towards burnout recently, so this was exactly what kind of book I wanted to read.