Sweden is the scenic location for this country-house suspense story, in which Bella Burnstone from England, takes a week to attend THE WILDERNESS RETREAT. Bella is stuck in her music composition for a horror film called The Screaming Hours, which will be her big break. As she drops her confident son Asher to start his college course, this single mother needs distraction.

A yoga and whole food week in Sweden sounds lovely. Stuart and Marie Hardy run the resort, which is set in the unfortunately named Dead Man's Forest. That should be the first clue that all won’t go as planned. Phones don’t work very well here in the forest, and the guests are asked to place their electronics in a box. Bella shrinks at severing the invisible umbilical cord – I thought Asher was probably much happier not to have his mother texting every hour. Maybe that’s why he arranged with Bella’s sister to gift her the week’s vacation.

Other guests include the improbable Oscar Wildman, a cluelessly offending, aspiring thriller writer. There’s a travel blogger called Lena and another guest called Kristel, plus the lodge staff. We get plenty of mentions of Scandi foods, from lingonberry jam to meatballs. There’s plentiful Gothic atmosphere with strange noises at night, walks in the dark pine forest, and a beautiful lake. Maybe I’ve read too many genuine wilderness thrillers, but I was sad that we returned to the lodge every evening for dinner. Often a wellness retreat won’t serve much alcohol, but Bella overindulges, which is odd. Then someone goes missing.

I found the sections in italics at the start or end of chapters, as dreams or flashbacks distracting. In my opinion, there has to be a better way to convey information because these look like padding. Italic paragraphs are hard on the eyes, and I don’t read them. Also, I consider the quota of ‘quite the something’ to be one per book at most, and we see this condescending phrase three times in the first few chapters. If author Jennifer Moore was trying to make me dislike her character, she succeeded.

As a thriller or even a murder mystery, THE WILDERNESS RETREAT falls short of the standard today, so I will go with the category of suspenseful, which fits nicely. Maybe you’ll book a Scandinavian retreat after reading this story, and maybe you won’t. But you’ll certainly see a different side of this location than the bleak winter cities of the Scandi thrillers. Exploring is good.