Maya is coming down from an addiction to Klonopin, which she is hiding from her live-in boyfriend, Dan. It was prescribed to her when she was seventeen and experiencing anxiety and depression over the sudden and unexplained death of her best friend, Audrey. Now seven years later, a video is circulating the internet in which another young woman drops dead out of the blue. The strangest part? She is in the presence of the same man that Audrey was with when she died. This young man, Frank, was also Maya's boyfriend at the time. Maya decides to temporarily leave Dan to go back to her hometown to investigate. Chapters of The House in the Pines alternate between Maya's past and the present. When she was seeing Frank as a teen, he tells her about a cabin he is building. The cabin is behind the home belonging to his father, who Frank is taking care of because he is unwell. There are odd gaps in Maya's memory from the short period of her romantic involvement with Frank. The actual physical key to the cabin stands out more than any memory of the cabin itself. Maya learns that Christina, the recent woman that died, had a tattoo of the cabin's key on her wrist.
A parallel story of Maya's father, a native of Mexico who died before Maya was born, compels the plot forward. Her father, Jairo, had completed a written work which Maya keeps close at hand and pores over while looking for connections to her odd circumstances. Maya's sick feelings from Klonopin withdrawal and subsequent alcohol abuse cloud the situation for Maya further.
Strange and compelling, Ana Reyes's novel had me turning the pages and trying to figure out if this was a regular old murder mystery, or some kind of magical realism. The House in the Pines has a supernatural atmosphere that kept me on my toes. I give this book at 3 out of 5 stars.
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