House in the Pines

The House in the Pines follows twenty-five-year-old Maya, who has spent seven years trying to escape the trauma of watching her childhood best friend, Aubrey West, die suddenly in the presence of an enigmatic older man named Frank Bellamy. Maya has since built a new life with her boyfriend, Dan, while quietly battling a drug habit that began in the aftermath of that day. When she stumbles across an online video of another young woman dying across a diner table from Frank, years later and hundreds of miles away, the past comes rushing back—and Maya realizes Aubrey's death may not have been an isolated tragedy.

As Maya investigates Frank's history and uncovers a pattern of similarly unexplained deaths surrounding him, she is drawn back to her Berkshires hometown to relive the summer that nearly destroyed her—the intensity of her friendship with Aubrey, and the obsessive jealousy that came with Frank's presence in their lives. Author Ana Reyes, whose own half-Guatemalan heritage informs Maya's backstory and a subplot involving her father, builds a psychological thriller told through an unreliable narrator grappling with memory, trauma, and whether the past can ever truly be confronted.

Published by Dutton in January 2023, The House in the Pines spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was selected as Reese's Book Club's first pick of that year.