ShortBookandScribes #BlogTour #BookReview – The Ice Retreat by Ruth Kelly

It’s my stop on the blog tour for The Ice Retreat by Ruth Kelly which is published by Pan Macmillan and out now in paperback, eBook and audiobook. My thanks to Chloe Davies for the review copy and the place on the tour.

From bestselling author Ruth Kelly, The Ice Retreat is a spine-tingling thriller set in the world of controversial wellness treatments. Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell and Sarah Pearse.

HEALER?

Meet Hollie Jenson, presenter of the smash-hit docu-series Bad Medicine, which exposes the perils of extreme therapies. Her next target: a new retreat run by wellness guru Ariel Rose, who claims to have discovered the secret to healing pain through her three-day ice rebirth treatment.

LIAR?

Acting on a mother’s plea to find her son, who vanished soon after his stay, Hollie ventures into the Swiss mountains where the retreat occupies a former observatory. There she will search for the boy, and hopes to expose Ariel as the charlatan she believes her to be.

KILLER?

As the isolation of the valley sets in, Hollie finds herself in an increasingly dangerous situation. There is much more to the retreat than meets the eye, and she must confront explosive secrets from her own past if she is to ever make it out alive . . .

I’d already read Ruth Kelly’s previous books, The Villa and The Escape, so I knew I would be in for a rollercoaster ride of a destination thriller with The Ice Retreat. The story follows Hollie, a Netflix investigative reporter as she looks into the eponymous retreat which promises rebirth through extreme ice therapy. Brrr!

Hollie manages to wangle a visit to the mysterious retreat, both to investigate a man who went missing after going there for treatment, and for other reasons that become clear throughout the book, and what also becomes apparent is that this is no innocent spa type of set-up.

The setting is king in this story. The cold and the isolation are palpable as Hollie narrates her own, possibly unreliable, view of all that is going on. I found Hollie rather prickly and there aren’t really any likeable characters but then I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find them in a psychological thriller. There are some clever curveballs along the way and some unexpected events, and this is certainly a fast-paced read. My visit to the Ice Retreat was thrilling and chilling with a side order of killing!

Ruth Kelly is a journalist who has ghosted a string of Sunday Times top ten bestsellers – with The Prison Doctor, having sold over 250,000 copies, and The Governor, going straight in at number one on the Amazon charts and number five in the Sunday Times bestseller list.

Holiday destinations feature heavily in Ruth’s thriller writing having spent most of her life traveling and exploring the world. Her family relocated to Papua New Guinea when she was seven-years-old and the travel bug hasn’t let up since. The simmering threat of what lies beneath the surface, the dichotomy of how paradise can also be hell fascinates Ruth. Making a destination a character in its own right – both a friend and an enemy, not someone to be trusted – is a thread explored throughout her writing.