ALONE IN A CABIN

A middle-aged woman trying to heal from a divorce retreats to an isolated cabin in this novel.

In Smith’s tale, 50-year-old Maggie Raines arrives at an old cabin off Patterson Road the day after Christmas, fresh from a divorce. Tom, her husband of 30 years, had revealed to her that he impregnated his receptionist, 26-year-old Bethany, and intended to help raise the child. This left Maggie reeling, “wondering if the next chapter of her life was to be an epic tragedy…a horror story…or maybe a suspense.” Packing her things from the house she and Tom shared all those years, she decided to become a writer and impulsively rented an old cabin in the woods of Marston County, 70 miles from Nashville, leaving her old life and her grown twins, Robbie and Cal, for a little isolation. Now, settling in that solitude, Maggie meets Zeke Thompson, a mysterious stranger who “looked like a fair-haired version of one of her teen idols.” He shows up at her door the same day a prisoner escapes from a nearby penitentiary. He quickly comes to seem unreal somehow—Maggie begins to wonder if she’s just imagining him. She confides all this to Marston County’s hardworking sheriff, Canon Dale, who listens sympathetically but privately notices that there are no extra tracks outside Maggie’s cabin, no evidence that anybody else has been there. Smith deftly presents Dale’s story parallel to Maggie’s in order to set up narrative momentum. He’s a workaholic who hasn’t taken a day off in 30 years, but he’s quickly attracted to Maggie—and almost immediately drawn into the mysteries that begin to deepen around her stay in the cabin. The author cannily crafts all of this in knowing and occasionally overlush prose, and she handles the unfolding mystery of Zeke with a great deal of skill. The romance between Dale and Maggie feels heavy-handed, but the rest of the intriguing tale works smoothly.

An engaging mix of bucolic mystery and the enigmas of the writing life.