The Retreat

Two years ago, Julia's world ended in the river beside her rural home: her husband drowned trying to save their young daughter, Lily, whose body was never found. Alone, grief-stricken, and short of money, Julia turns the house into a writers' retreat, filling its rooms with strangers rather than face its silence — and clinging, against all reason, to the hope that Lily might still be alive.

One of her first guests is Lucas, a horror novelist who becomes fascinated by the story of the missing girl and begins digging into what really happened. But as he investigates, the retreat is disturbed by a string of eerie, inexplicable events, and a local legend about the water and the woods starts to feel less like folklore and more like warning.

Mark Edwards blends psychological suspense with a genuine chill in The Retreat, a twisty thriller about grief, obsession, and the secrets a small community will kill to keep buried.