The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager ~ Book Review

Dutton
Thriller
My Rating: 🍪🍪.5

If you watched The Woman Across the Street from the Girl in the Window,  a Netflix show satirizing the thriller genre, the premise of The House Across the Lake will feel a little on the nose. Casey’s life has gone off the rails. Following the drowning of her husband at their lake house, she starts drinking heavily, causing her acting career to go off the rails and her to flee back to the lake house for privacy. Out of curiosity, she begins spying on the couple across the lake and begins to believe that something sinister is at play.

Sager created a rich setting with the lake community and Casey’s big empty house. The story is shadowed by the fading news of several nearby disappearances that keep Casey constantly on edge. Her excessive drinking makes her a classic unreliable narrator, and I enjoyed trying to untangle what was real and what she was extrapolating, as well as which of her neighbors could be trusted.

I was really into this book until about two-thirds of the way in when it took a kind of supernatural twist that I was not feeling. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t like ghost-y stuff in thrillers. If I couldn’t theoretically have guessed the twist before it happened, it’s not my kind of read. Despite how enthralled I was with the beginning of this book, the twist really lost me.

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