The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes

“Some cultures blame such deaths on evil spirits. The mind will always try to explain what it can’t understand—it will make up stories, theories, whole belief systems—and Maya’s mind, Dr. Barry said, was of the type that saw faces in clouds and messages in tea leaves.”

Maya was in the summer between high school and college when her best friend, Aubrey, dropped dead in front of her and the guy Maya had been dating, Frank. There was no explanation and the autopsy showed no reason for Aubrey’s death…Seven years later, Maya is living in Boston with her boyfriend. She is trying to give up her secret addiction to Klonopin which has kept her functioning since Aubrey’s death. During another night with no sleep, Maya comes across a YouTube video that shows a woman in a diner who falls over for no apparent reason and is pronounced dead. The woman in the video was dining with a man – and that man was Frank. Maya decides it’s time to go back to her hometown to figure out happened to Aubrey and this woman.

I really liked this book! It’s a smaller suspense novel, but Ana Reyes packed a lot into it. With our narrator going through withdrawal and possible mental health incidents, we are constantly wondering what we can believe is true. Chapters jump back and forth between past and present without labels which some reviewers found annoying. I thought, in this book, it made sense not to let us know which time we were in from the start of the chapter. So many of the “past” chapters seem to be Maya finally remembering what happened seven years ago, so it felt like it was past, but also present at the same time. I also liked that we got a bit of Guatemalan history throughout the novel with Maya’s parents meeting in her dad’s hometown in Guatemala.

This book has received very mixed reviews, but I thought it was a worthwhile suspense story! I recommend it to all readers of suspense.

Check out The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes for yourself at the Library (https://catalog.lclibs.org/polaris/search/title.aspx…) or listen through the eLibrary at https://lclibs.overdrive.com/media/8957216.