Author: Ana Reyes

Publisher: Dutton Books

ISBN: 9780593186718

A young woman still dealing with the death of her best friend is horrified to learn that another person has died in the same mysterious way. As the woman sets out to discover the truth behind the odd circumstances, she must face her own buried memories. Author Ana Reyes impresses in parts with her debut but struggles to pull the entire story together in The House in the Pines.

Seven years after her best friend, Aubrey, died in front of her, Maya has moved from her tiny Pennsylvania town to Boston and tried to form a new life for herself. She has a steady job at a garden center; it’s not exactly rocket science, but she’s good at what she does and likes it well enough. She also has a boyfriend, Dan, who loves her. They’ve recently moved in together, and Maya feels like her life is starting to resemble something called normal.

Because for the longest time, her life wasn’t normal. If she lets herself think too hard about it, she’s still devastated by Aubrey’s death. What hurts even more is that no one believed Maya at the time that Aubrey’s death wasn’t an accident. Maya thinks her then-boyfriend, Frank, killed Aubrey. The circumstances, though, were so bizarre that even Maya has doubted herself at times. One minute Aubrey and Frank were standing and talking to one another; the next Aubrey was on the ground.

Therapy and drugs have helped Maya mute much of the past. Dan doesn’t know about the medication she was taking, and he also doesn’t know that recently Maya ran out of it and has been experiencing withdrawal. Add to that the fact that Maya sees a video of another young woman sitting across Frank in a diner who dies in a way eerily similar to Aubrey, and these days Maya’s semblance of normal has spun out of control.

Seeing the video reignites in Maya the deep desire to prove that Aubrey’s death wasn’t an accident. She goes back to her childhood home in Pennsylvania to stay with her mother while she retraces her steps from seven years ago. Maya is convinced that if she re-examines everything with the clear-eyed approach that time and distance should have given her, she’ll be able to solve Aubrey’s murder once and for all.

Going back means Maya will have to face her past. She’ll have to deal with the problematic relationship she had with Frank and that he may have mistreated her in some way. The trouble is that there are holes in Maya’s memories, and she’s sure that Frank is responsible for those too. If she can find a way to root out those experiences, she’ll have all the answers. She’s not sure, however, whether she wants to face the truth. 

Author Ana Reyes reveals in her note at the back of the book that this novel started as a thesis project in her MFA program, and in many ways it reads like one. Reyes’s pacing and the inclusion of Maya’s Guatemalan heritage will keep readers engaged. Although the start of Maya’s story sounds like so many other unreliable, drug-dependent protagonists, her yearning to discover the truth rings true.

The book falters in places, though. A subplot about Maya’s writer father, who died before she was born, offers some interesting side anecdotes. Despite the obvious wish of the narration to tie Maya’s father’s unfinished manuscript to the mysterious deaths, the connection feels forced. Readers may wonder whether the narration is stretching itself too thin in many scenes to accomplish too many things all at once. 

Also, Maya is presented as being in her mid-20s at the start of the story, yet she doesn’t sound much older than her 17-year-old self in many scenes. Part of this could be attributed to her inability to grow as a person due to the horrific circumstances around Aubrey’s death; part of it feels like lack of character development on the mechanical level. The book bounces back and forth between present day and the past, causing the naivete of the writing rather than Maya as a character to be the focus.

The climax and the cause of Aubrey’s death might cause more skeptical readers to raise an eyebrow. The narration pushes the boundaries of the suspension of disbelief in more than one place. Ultimately, however, the book is a fairly satisfying thriller. Those who want a quick read, particularly attached to a celebrity book club, will want to pick this one up. I recommend readers Borrow The House in the Pines.