The cozy mountain setting of Lake Arrowhead, California comes to life in all its glorious seasons with THE GIRLS IN CABIN NUMBER THREE, the second installment in Chrysteen Braun’s The Guest Book Trilogy. An elderly Annie Parker revisits her past as a young woman rebuilding post-divorce, trying to maintain a cabin rental business and start up her career as an aspiring interior designer. While a lucrative new project puts her romantic relationship with contractor Noah in danger, Annie meets Carrie, a grieving daughter looking to renovate her mother’s lake house property. Annie and Carrie’s easy friendship soon grows, as Carrie uncovers shocking secrets in her mother’s past that also tie Annie’s cabins to the blood-soaked mob and the glitz and glamor of Old Hollywood.
With its meticulous historical research throughout, the book peels back the decades to the eighties, where Annie is getting her interior design business off the ground, and the roaring twenties, where mob interests and clandestine Hollywood drama hides in the mountains. Though embellished for the story’s plot, the sequences in the 1920s are particularly compelling, with Carrie’s mother Elizabeth taking over narration duties. From the dirt-poor farm where she was raised, to the ritzy hotel where she’s surrounded by movie stars, starlets, and big-name mob personalities like Bugsy Siegel, Elizabeth’s harrowing life is rendered in sharp detail. Tudor House, the idyllic, elegant property that seems to connect the characters, becomes a gorgeous set piece through decades of change. The book is filled with charming characters and menacing antagonists, like Annie’s client Grayson, who stirs up relationship trouble, and Bunny, the rich divorcee with her eye on Noah.
It’s unfortunate that the central mystery never really manifests, and the parallel narratives aren’t interwoven as tightly as they could’ve been. Aside from Annie doing some minor research into the Tudor House’s past and the names in her cabins’ guest book, her part in the investigation remains somewhat passive and distant. Paul, Carrie’s boyfriend with an interesting familial connection to Bugsy Siegel, isn’t given much of an opportunity to explore what this means. The shock of Carrie’s discovery fizzles out pretty fast, as there aren’t real in-depth discussions of the potential fallout between her, Paul, and Annie. Much of it feels glossed over in the end, and once Elizabeth takes over narrating, the story becomes straightforward with a noticeable absence of suspense. The lack of sleuthing takes the metaphorical wind out of the mystery’s sails. It’s partly due to the uneven pacing—the characters’ perspective chapters aren’t distributed evenly, too much page time is spent on interludes in Annie’s life, and the real mystery doesn’t unfold until the last act of the book. Carrie’s mother’s story is easily the most captivating of them, which in itself could’ve been a book all its own.
Although rife with charming characters, a gorgeous mountain setting, and meticulous research, the intriguing central mystery in Chrysteen Braun’s THE GIRLS IN CABIN NUMBER THREE never quite reaches the tension it needs and the two parallel stories lack a true sense of interwoven suspense.
~Jessica Thomas for IndieReader