The Girl in Cabin 13

This mystery novel follows FBI Special Agent Emma Griffin, sent undercover to a small Virginia town to investigate a string of disappearances and murders, only to become entangled with the person responsible.

In a prologue set six months before the main action, Emma works undercover as "Brittany," a fabricated gang associate, trying to coax a suspect called Snake into confessing to crimes against children. She loses control, chasing Snake into a bait car, a vehicle planted to prevent escape, and fighting him until he confesses. Though the operation succeeds, her supervisor, Creagan, strips her of field duty for recklessness and assigns her to desk work.

Six months later, Creagan sends Emma alone to Feathered Nest, Virginia, a tiny, isolated town plagued by ten connected cases: eight missing people and two bodies found mangled near railroad tracks. The case became federal when one body turned up across the state line in North Carolina. Emma arrives at cabin number 13, a remote log house by a lake, and reviews the case files without finding any pattern. Her thoughts drift to her own losses: her father, who disappeared nine years earlier, and her ex-boyfriend Greg, who vanished after an abrupt breakup. Her best friend Bellamy calls to check on her, followed by a call from her other best friend and fellow FBI agent Eric. During Eric's call, someone knocks on the cabin door. She opens it to find a large man who collapses dead on the porch, bleeding from a wound, with a folded paper bearing Emma's real name clutched in his hand. She hides the paper from responding officers.

Interspersed throughout the novel are flashback chapters depicting a young girl, implied to be Emma, experiencing her mother's death, enduring constant moves, and watching her father stare at a mysterious man at a Florida water park. These chapters establish Emma's fractured past.

At the police station, Chief LaRoche questions Emma under her cover name, Emma Monroe. His suspicious demeanor puts her on guard. While police process the crime scene, she visits the local tavern, Teddy's, and meets its owner, Jake Logan, a charismatic man in his mid-thirties who comps her food and offers to drive her home. On the drive, he hints at disappearances haunting the town. Their connection is immediate.

Over the following days, Jake introduces Emma around town, lending her credibility with the insular residents. He shares stories of an idyllic childhood: a loving grandmother, siblings, Easter egg hunts, and a family trip to see elephants at age seven. Emma interviews the mother of a missing woman and examines the railroad tracks where a victim named Cristela Jordan was found. Jake calls Emma before dawn one morning: his father's grave has been desecrated and the body stolen. At Jake's house, she studies family photo albums with pictures of his grandmother in a floral dress and his sister with a dog named Mocha. Jake explains his father exposed corruption in town, generating grudges that followed him to the grave. Police later trace the stolen bones to the property of an elderly man, Cole Barnes, and Jake erupts in accusations before Emma pulls him away.

Emma's investigation deepens. In the woods behind the cabin, she discovers a hidden path to the railroad tracks and a dog collar chained to a tree. She theorizes Cristela was held captive in the woods, escaped onto the tracks, and was struck by a passing train. Camera footage obtained by Eric supports this theory. At the hotel where the dead man stayed under the fake name Ron Murdock, Emma spots LaRoche embracing a young blonde woman, Andrea Layne. Walking to her car, two gunshots ring out; LaRoche arrives suspiciously fast. Hotel records reveal Cristela checked in days before her death and never checked out, while Andrea's first registration appears just after Cristela's death, as though she replaced Cristela in LaRoche's life. Emma becomes convinced LaRoche is the killer.

Someone follows Emma through the woods at night, shatters the light on her cabin, and places glass inside her locked car. Tensions mount when Jake notices crime scene photographs on her coffee table and accuses her of exploiting the town's pain; she deflects by claiming a true-crime hobby. At the cemetery, she discovers the grave of Jake's late wife, Melanie Logan, but no other Logan family graves. She shares her suspicions about LaRoche with Jake, who urges her to stay at his house for safety.

Eric emails Emma a photograph of her parents with the dead man from the porch, taken at Disney's Animal Kingdom in 1998. She catches a discrepancy: Jake claimed he visited the park at age seven, but it did not open until he was twelve. Jake texts a plausible correction, attributing the confusion to a different park. That night, Jake fails to come home. Emma drives to the bar and finds blood covering every surface. She confronts LaRoche, who provides an alibi and reveals Jake facilitated LaRoche's affairs with both Cristela and Andrea. Creagan gives Emma two days to produce results or lose her badge.

Alone at the cabin, Emma recognizes the quilt on her bed: It contains fabric from the dress Jake's grandmother wore in the photo album. She realizes the cabin was Jake's grandmother's house. Physical details match Jake's stories precisely: hook holes from a porch swing, scratch marks from the dog, a bare spot where a birdbath stood. She calls Eric to mobilize the FBI team.

Following the woodland path away from the tracks, Emma discovers a dilapidated farmhouse hidden in the forest. LaRoche reveals Jake grew up in the apartment above the tavern and had no known siblings or grandmother. Inside the farmhouse's hidden sub-basement, Emma finds more than a dozen taxidermized human bodies posed in domestic tableaux: families decorating a Christmas tree, sharing dinner, having tea. She recognizes the faces as the missing people from her investigation. The door locks behind her, trapping her.

When Jake arrives, Emma hides, then sprints for the exit, but the door crushes her hand. Jake confesses everything. His father was a violent alcoholic; his grandmother, who lived in cabin 13, was his only source of love. Cole Barnes had an affair with Jake's mother, making Barnes likely Jake's biological father and deepening his father's resentment of Jake. His wife Melanie was real: his father became obsessed with her and killed her by running her down with a car. Jake poisoned his father over months in revenge, his first murder. After killing a bar patron who beat his wife, Jake began targeting abusive people across five states. He then shifted to kidnapping people who resembled ideal family members, preserving them through taxidermy, and posing them in scenes of domestic happiness he never experienced. He dug up his father's bones and planted them at Barnes's property to create a distraction. The blood at the bar was staged to frame LaRoche. Jake admits he knew Emma was FBI, shot at the hotel to keep her focused on LaRoche, and planted evidence to misdirect her.

Jake locks Emma in an upstairs bedroom. When he passes out from drinking, she ignites the curtains and shoves him through the window onto the roof. They struggle, and both fall, crashing through hedges to the ground.

Emma wakes in a hospital with Bellamy and Eric at her side. Eric explains that her email with the photographs transmitted when she briefly regained cell service while fleeing through the woods, enabling the FBI to trace her phone to the burning farmhouse. Jake survives but faces federal prosecution. Some recovered bodies have parts from different victims stitched together, complicating identification. Creagan grants Emma vacation time and allows Eric to pass her a lead on Greg's disappearance in Maine. In the epilogue, Emma leaves Feathered Nest with a photograph of her parents alongside the still-unidentified man from the porch, a mystery she plans to pursue next.