Retreat by Krysten Ritter Summary, Characters and Themes

Retreat by Krysten Ritter is a sleek psychological thriller that follows a cunning con artist who assumes another woman’s identity in an attempt to escape her own crumbling life.  What begins as a calculated con spirals into a dangerous masquerade, filled with shifting identities, buried secrets, and murder.

With its coastal Mexican setting, high-stakes social climbing, and shadowy corporate corruption, the novel explores how far someone will go to survive—and whether it’s ever truly possible to outrun oneself.  It’s a story about performance and power, about the mirrors we hold up to others and the darkness we hide inside.

Summary

Liz Dawson, a sophisticated grifter who thrives by manipulating wealthy elites, makes her living by mirroring the desires and weaknesses of others.  Her opening scheme at a gala in Chicago earns her both a valuable ruby ring and an art consultancy scam investment from an affluent philanthropist, Mrs.

Reed.  Fleeing the suspicion that begins to mount, Liz accepts an invitation to work on an art installation at a villa in Punta Mita, Mexico—owned by Isabelle Beresford and her husband Oliver.

Seizing the opportunity, Liz travels to Mexico under a fresh alias and quickly settles into the lavish estate.

While enjoying the comforts of her borrowed life, Liz also begins contemplating the fantasy of going straight, though her conning instincts remain intact.  The illusion begins to fracture when, during a hike with a woman named Tilly, Liz stumbles upon two dead bodies.

Recognizing them as Oliver and Isabelle, she makes a fateful decision: she disposes of the bodies and assumes Isabelle’s identity.  With Isabelle and Oliver both out of the picture, Liz believes she can finally live a life of privilege and freedom—if she can maintain the deception.

As Isabelle, Liz effortlessly integrates herself into Punta Mita’s elite society.  She builds a believable digital persona and handles social obligations while juggling her internal anxieties.

However, complications arise when David Morrow, a business associate of Oliver’s, contacts her, asking about his whereabouts.  Liz invents a story that Oliver is heli-skiing in Alaska and supports the lie through credit card activity and fake travel itineraries.

But the web tightens.  Rumors surface about Oliver’s affair with a woman in Sayulita, and Liz begins to realize just how unstable her position is.

Snooping through Oliver’s secret study, she uncovers damning information about a shell company tied to a mining project called Cobre Vista.  The project is connected to Palmer Kelly’s husband, Neil, who is potentially involved in criminal activities.

Determined to protect herself, Liz crashes a party at the Kellys’ villa and steals Neil’s phone, discovering texts that reveal Oliver had become a liability.  When Neil confronts her, Liz turns the tables by threatening him with photos of Oliver and his mistress, buying herself time and leverage.

Meanwhile, Liz’s relationship with Tilly grows stranger and more unsettling.  Tilly knows too much, acts erratically, and even suggests fleeing to Brazil together.

Liz resists, not just because she suspects danger, but also because she has developed romantic feelings for Braden, Oliver’s estranged brother.  Braden, believing she is Isabelle, grows close to her, and they begin a passionate affair.

But Liz is conflicted, haunted by the lie she’s living and increasingly suspicious of everyone around her.

Braden and Liz work together to investigate Oliver’s finances, uncovering millions funneled into VH Inc. , a suspicious shell company.

As they dig deeper, danger closes in: a threatening enforcer tied to Neil turns up dead, suggesting that someone is cleaning house.  At the same time, Tilly becomes more volatile.

She brandishes a knife playfully, drops cryptic hints, and makes Liz feel like a pawn in someone else’s scheme.

The story reaches a boiling point at a lavish regatta gala.  As Liz plays hostess in front of the town’s elite, Braden interrogates Neil.

The festive atmosphere is shattered by the discovery of a human skull on the beach.  Though Liz initially fears it’s one of the bodies she disposed of, the remains turn out to be Oliver and Madeleine—his mistress—not Isabelle.

With police attention intensifying and new revelations about Oliver’s updated will naming Braden as heir, Liz begins to suspect that Braden himself may have motives for murder.

As her paranoia deepens, Liz tries to flee.  But Braden catches her, leading to a violent confrontation where she kills him with a copper statue in a moment of desperate self-defense.

In shock, she discovers an email confirming that one of the shell companies from Oliver’s dealings was registered under her real name—Elizabeth Dawson.  This terrifying revelation makes her wonder if she has been set up from the start.

The final twist arrives with the unveiling of the real Isabelle Beresford, who had been posing all along as Tilly.  Isabelle reveals that she manipulated Liz from the beginning, orchestrating events to fake her own death and leave Liz to take the fall.

A brutal struggle between the two women ensues in the mirrored bathroom of the villa.  One woman emerges alive, the other does not.

In the aftermath, the villa burns down with two bodies inside.  An article reports on a supposed lovers’ quarrel and the unraveling of a major financial scandal tied to Oliver and Neil.

At the airport, the survivor—carrying a new ID and passport—prepares to flee to Brazil.  Though she has escaped, questions linger.

The woman is no longer sure who she is.  Whether Liz or Isabelle won that final fight remains ambiguous.

The boundaries between predator and prey, truth and fiction, have dissolved.  What is certain is that the survivor is no longer running from danger—she has become it.

Characters

Elizabeth Hastings / Elizabeth Dawson / “Isabelle Beresford”

At the heart of Retreat is Elizabeth Hastings—born Elizabeth Dawson—a master manipulator whose very existence is a fluid, shifting performance.  From the outset, Elizabeth is a deeply layered character who survives by exploiting the malleability of identity.

She sees herself as a mirror, shaped by the desires and weaknesses of others, particularly wealthy women who become her marks.  Her beauty is a tool, her empathy a tactical weapon, and her sense of morality entirely transactional.

Despite her apparent ruthlessness—stealing from grieving widows, faking entire personas, and manipulating her way into luxury estates—she remains oddly sympathetic.  Her yearning for escape, her exhaustion from constant deception, and her brief fantasies of going legitimate inject complexity into her character.

As she slips into the role of Isabelle Beresford, Elizabeth teeters between imposter and inheritor, gradually blurring the line between survival and ambition.  The psychological weight of assuming another’s life—of living with past traumas, fresh lies, and creeping paranoia—turns her arc into a haunting meditation on the cost of reinvention.

By the end, Elizabeth is no longer certain who she really is, having internalized her assumed identity so deeply that the boundary between con artist and counterfeit has vanished.  Whether she survives as Liz or Isabelle—or becomes something more monstrous entirely—is the novel’s chilling, unresolved question.

Isabelle Beresford / “Tilly” / Susan

The real Isabelle Beresford, later revealed to be operating under multiple identities including “Tilly” and ultimately Susan, is the true architect of the novel’s darkest deceptions.  As “Tilly,” she presents herself as cheerful, athletic, and slightly eccentric—someone who befriends Elizabeth seemingly by chance.

But in reality, Isabelle is a calculating and deeply disturbed woman orchestrating a grand erasure of her identity by faking her death and manipulating someone else into taking her place.  Her psychological complexity is rooted in her ability to both charm and unsettle, to offer rescue and pose lethal threats in the same breath.

The culmination of her arc reveals that she not only intended to kill Oliver but used Liz as the perfect patsy, a doppelgänger to absorb the consequences of her actions.  Her duality is terrifying: on the surface, she’s a victim, a woman trying to escape a powerful and violent husband; but underneath, she’s a cold strategist willing to commit murder, manipulate everyone around her, and erase her own existence to secure freedom.

In many ways, Isabelle functions as Liz’s shadow self—a projection of what Liz might become if she fully embraced her darkest instincts.  Their final confrontation is not merely physical but existential, a violent struggle for identity, survival, and domination.

Braden Beresford

Braden, Oliver’s estranged brother, initially enters the narrative as a romantic interest and becomes a deeply complicated figure in Elizabeth’s increasingly fragmented reality.  He is sensitive and intelligent, with a protective instinct that seems genuine, yet his motives are never entirely clear.

His attraction to the woman he believes to be Isabelle is fueled by past affection and unresolved emotions, making his relationship with Elizabeth fraught with unspoken grief and mistaken identity.  His willingness to forgive “Isabelle” and forge an alliance with her—both romantic and investigative—offers Elizabeth fleeting security and validation.

But as Elizabeth begins to suspect him of deeper involvement in Oliver’s shady financial dealings and possibly even murder, Braden transforms from a source of safety into a potential threat.  This shift culminates in a violent confrontation that ends in Braden’s death, further destabilizing Elizabeth and solidifying her descent into paranoia and survival mode.

Braden represents the ambiguous moral terrain of the novel: a man whose intentions may have been pure or criminal—or both—ultimately destroyed by the toxic legacy of the Beresford name and Elizabeth’s need to stay alive at any cost.

Oliver Beresford

Though largely absent from the story’s present timeline, Oliver’s presence is palpable through the web of secrets, crimes, and betrayals he leaves behind.  A high-powered financier tied to dubious mining deals and potentially to the cartel, Oliver is the fulcrum around which the entire plot turns.

He is a man of double lives—married to Isabelle, having an affair with Madeleine Richards, and embroiled in clandestine financial operations.  His will revision, naming Braden as sole heir, and his connections to shell corporations add layers of mystery and suspicion to his character.

Oliver is not merely a victim but a villain in his own right—someone whose greed and duplicity make him complicit in the corruption that haunts the narrative.  His death with Madeleine in the jungle, likely at Isabelle’s hands, suggests that he underestimated the danger in his own household.

While he never directly interacts with Elizabeth, his shadow hangs over her every decision, symbolizing the rot at the core of the luxurious world she tries to claim.

Neil Kelly

Neil Kelly, Palmer’s husband and Oliver’s business associate, represents the threatening nexus of white-collar corruption and physical menace.  He is arrogant, violent, and entitled—quick to confront, threaten, and use force when crossed.

As Elizabeth investigates Oliver’s past, Neil emerges as a major antagonist, implicated in the cartel-backed mining venture Cobre Vista and determined to protect his interests at all costs.  His threats against Elizabeth, including a near-assault, reveal his capacity for real violence, aligning him with the most dangerous elements of the Beresford empire.

Yet he also serves as a foil to Elizabeth: where she lies to survive, he lies to dominate.  His eventual downfall in the financial scandal that erupts after the villa fire is both satisfying and ironic, a collapse orchestrated in part by the very woman he tried to destroy.

Tilly (as perceived before the reveal)

Before her true identity is revealed, Tilly is perceived as a quirky, well-meaning friend who simply wants companionship and adventure.  She becomes Elizabeth’s hiking partner, her social crutch, and an unknowing enabler of her schemes.

Her growing erraticism—brandishing a knife, suggesting a move to Brazil—starts to trouble Elizabeth, signaling an unspoken threat.  This version of Tilly is crafted to reflect what Elizabeth wants to see: a harmless, if eccentric, companion.

Her behavior only truly makes sense in retrospect, once it’s revealed that she was never Tilly at all but the real Isabelle Beresford.  This transformation reconfigures all prior interactions as deliberate manipulations, a chilling reminder of just how thoroughly the real Isabelle played the long game.

Madeleine Richards

Madeleine, Oliver’s mistress, is mostly seen through the clues she leaves behind and the gossip that surrounds her.  Though not fully fleshed out as a character on the page, her role is essential to the plot’s unraveling.

Her death alongside Oliver is what allows Elizabeth’s assumption of Isabelle’s identity to remain intact.  Yet her existence—tied to Oliver’s betrayal—also hints at the emotional and psychological abuse that may have driven Isabelle to her extremes.

Madeleine represents collateral damage, a woman who trusted the wrong man and was ultimately caught in a fatal power struggle.  She becomes a spectral presence in the story, one of the many ghostly figures haunting the novel’s luxurious but deadly setting.

Themes

Identity as a Construct and a Weapon

In Retreat, identity is less a stable fact and more a flexible, performative tool—shaped, discarded, or reassembled to suit the needs of survival, ambition, and control.  The protagonist, Liz Dawson, operates in a world where who you are is less important than who others think you are.

From the very first moment she introduces herself under a false name, she proves that identity is not sacred to her—it is currency.  Her chameleon-like ability to mimic, project, and absorb the traits desired by others gives her power, but also alienates her from a core self.

This fractured sense of self becomes increasingly unstable as she slips deeper into roles, particularly that of Isabelle Beresford.  What begins as impersonation becomes internalization, until Liz can no longer distinguish her own voice from the one she’s assumed.

The process of becoming Isabelle is gradual but corrosive.  She doesn’t just learn Isabelle’s mannerisms—she inherits her enemies, her lovers, her trauma, and ultimately her fate.

By the novel’s end, the mirror metaphor from the beginning comes full circle: Liz no longer reflects others; she is consumed by what she once mirrored.  This erasure of the self under the weight of projected identities suggests that identity, when too easily manipulated, risks imploding entirely.

It is both armor and curse, empowering Liz to infiltrate elite spaces while simultaneously robbing her of authenticity and agency.  The final pages, where Liz questions whether she is even alive or if Isabelle continues to exist within her, crystallize identity not as a possession, but as a contested terrain.

Morality Under Pressure

The moral compass of Retreat is not simply bent—it is under constant negotiation.  Liz doesn’t begin her journey as a passive figure swept up in external dangers; she is an active agent of deceit, theft, and manipulation.

Her choices are rationalized not through delusions of goodness but through a survivalist ethos: she does what she must.  However, as stakes rise and the consequences of her impersonation become violent and irreversible, the ethical lines blur beyond recognition.

When she disposes of two dead bodies, it’s not justice or grief guiding her—it’s convenience and opportunity.  Each lie builds upon the last, and soon her ability to stop lying becomes impossible.

What makes her actions more disturbing is how often they are justified as necessary responses to worse threats—corrupt businessmen, abusive men, a sociopathic mastermind in disguise.  Yet at no point does Liz reckon with her own initial wrongdoings.

Instead of remorse, what she feels is fear—of getting caught, of being outmaneuvered, of losing control.  Her acts of self-defense, while potentially justified on paper, are also tainted by her pattern of prioritizing self-preservation over truth.

The final confrontation, in which she kills to survive, is not framed as an ultimate moral stand but as a natural extension of her ongoing pattern.  In this world, morality is a luxury, and survival is the only meaningful law.

The erosion of her ethics is not sudden but methodical, shaped by circumstances, and worsened by the absence of any true accountability.  The novel suggests that under pressure, morality often becomes a liability.

Female Power, Manipulation, and Survival

The world of Retreat is governed by performances of femininity, where power is extracted not through brute force, but through persuasion, charm, seduction, and deception.  Women like Liz and the real Isabelle don’t fight for dominance in boardrooms or courtroom dramas—they operate in kitchens, bedrooms, and poolside parties.

Their battles are fought in silks and smiles, in whispered rumors and carefully curated identities.  The novel is filled with women manipulating other women: Liz manipulates Mrs.

Reed and Isabelle’s social circle, while Isabelle manipulates Liz into adopting her discarded identity.  These acts are not painted as empowerment in the traditional feminist sense, but as a commentary on the limited and often brutal tools women are given to survive in elite, male-dominated structures.

The most powerful characters, like Susan/Isabelle, have survived by becoming predators in a world that expects them to be prey.  Their ruthlessness is born of necessity, their cunning a reflection of learned helplessness flipped on its head.

At the same time, these performances carry costs.  Solidarity among women becomes impossible when trust is a weakness and every kindness might be a trap.

Liz’s relationship with Tilly, once warm and protective, becomes fraught with suspicion and dread.  Love, too, is suspect.

The intimacy with Braden, though passionate, exists under layers of lies.  Ultimately, the novel suggests that for women like Liz, power is always precarious and hard-won—dependent not on truth, but on performance.

And when the performance ends, so too does the illusion of safety.

Capitalism and Corruption

Throughout Retreat, the machinery of wealth is shown to be inseparable from lies, criminality, and violence.  The elite society that Liz infiltrates operates on illusion and rot.

Real estate, luxury art, venture capital, and philanthropic foundations are not mere symbols of affluence—they are cover stories for money laundering, infidelity, shell companies, and cartel connections.  The Beresfords and Kellys, with their estates and galas, present themselves as tasteful curators of civilization while simultaneously funding illegal copper mining ventures and engaging in financial fraud.

What’s more, the tools Liz uses to manipulate this class—faked documents, beauty, social grace—are indistinguishable from the tools the class uses to maintain its power.  Her cons mirror their corruption, blurring the distinction between outsider and insider.

The irony is that Liz’s petty thefts and impersonations are small compared to the multi-million-dollar deceptions conducted by Neil Kelly or the Beresfords.  Yet she carries the bulk of the risk.

The novel critiques a system in which wealth shields the guilty while making scapegoats of the expendable.  Capitalism in this world is not just an economic system—it is an aesthetic, a performance, a web of fake smiles and wire transfers.

Even Liz, who enters this world to steal from it, is ultimately consumed by it.  She doesn’t escape with riches; she escapes with trauma, paranoia, and blood on her hands.

The cost of touching this world, even temporarily, is irreversible.  The dream of luxury is exposed not as a goal but as a trap—glittering, seductive, and ultimately fatal.

Psychological Fragmentation and Unreliable Perception

One of the most unsettling currents running through Retreat is the gradual psychological disintegration of its narrator.  Liz begins the novel as calculating and self-aware—she knows she’s lying, and to whom.

But as her impersonation of Isabelle becomes more complete, her grip on reality begins to shift.  The boundaries between performance and authenticity, between self and other, begin to dissolve.

Her internal voice fractures.  At times she speaks as Liz, at others she mimics Isabelle’s tone and mannerisms without consciously realizing it.

Mirrors recur throughout the narrative, both literal and metaphorical, reflecting not just external appearances but also internal ambiguity.  The mirrored bathroom becomes the climactic site of her psychological reckoning, a space where duality can no longer be maintained and must be resolved violently.

The woman she kills may be the real Isabelle, but it’s also a symbolic slaying of a part of herself—the part that sought safety in deceit.  Her doubts afterward, expressed in the final passages, are not logistical but existential: she doesn’t just wonder if she’ll get caught; she wonders if she still exists as a coherent individual.

The novel doesn’t offer resolution.  Instead, it leaves the reader suspended in the same vertigo that plagues Liz—where memory, guilt, fear, and identity coil into an unending spiral.

This psychological fragmentation mirrors the novel’s themes of control and illusion, suggesting that once deception becomes a way of life, it also becomes a permanent fracture in the mind.  The danger isn’t just in getting caught—it’s in losing the ability to remember who you ever were.