House in the Pines

Maya is twenty-five and has spent seven years trying to outrun one afternoon, the day her childhood best friend, Aubrey West, died suddenly while an older man named Frank Bellamy was with her. Maya has built a new life with her boyfriend, Dan. She also hides a drug habit that began in the aftermath of Aubrey's death.

Then a video online catches her eye: another young woman collapses and dies at a diner table, with Frank sitting opposite. The death happens years later and hundreds of miles from Aubrey's. Maya begins to suspect that what she saw as a girl was not a single, isolated tragedy.

She starts digging into Frank's history and finds a pattern of unexplained deaths around him. The search pulls her back to her hometown in the Berkshires and to the summer that nearly destroyed her: the closeness of her friendship with Aubrey, and the obsessive jealousy that Frank's presence stirred up.

This is a psychological thriller told by an unreliable narrator, so memory and trauma shape what the reader can trust. A subplot involving Maya's father draws on the author's own half-Guatemalan heritage, which also informs Maya's backstory.

The book moves between present-day investigation and the past, and the mood stays tense and unsettled. Dutton published it in January 2023, and it was Reese's Book Club's first pick of that year.