Casey spends her time spying on Katherine and Tom Royce, her beautiful and wealthy neighbours. Their newly developed house sits directly across the lake from her cottage. Do y'all remember when we were super excited once we finished home before dark and wanted Riley to publish a supernatural book? Yeah? Right? Yeah, so this isn't it. Katherine is ex supermodel, new philanthropist, married to Thomas, founder of social media company called “ Mixer”, such an intense, pretentious, absolutely another irritating character! Riley sager treats alcoholism as though it's something you can switch on and off. She just manages to forget she hasn't had a drink in hours or days when before she was getting shaky not having it. She then purges the house of all the alcohol like it's nothing.

How Riley sager assumes people are reading his book and how I'm reading it when I got to the twist. I put this on here a long time ago and I've no idea why. And it wasn't even very good. There's an American writer who has a boat. And for some reason he ends up having to ferry some party guests over to the house of a wealthy man and his femme fatale trophy wife. Obviously this book is incredibly difficult to review without giving away spoilers, so pardon my vagueness. What you need to know going in is that there are a handful of twists, and each one comes in a different way. The format of storytelling, which relies on short "Now" sections, lengthy "Then" sections, and a final "Later" section that serves as an epilogue of sorts, is structured that way for a reason.A decent read, but there were a few quibbles of mine that prevented me from giving it a full four stars. Despite Anson's warnings, Casey continues spying on the Royce home. She and Conrad begin to investigate the case of the missing girls. Casey's suspicions turn to Conrad himself when she discovers that Conrad was at one point a suspect in his wife's death. Feeling she can no longer trust anyone else, Casey takes matters into her own hands. She breaks into the Royce home and finds Katherine tied up in the basement, but still alive. Tom confronts both of them and "Katherine" explains that she is in fact Casey's dead husband Len. If you're like me you don't expect much from Riley Sager, so when I was sent this book for review I was eager to jump right in. In typical Sager fashion, we have a woman as our main character who is alone. For me, the conversations between the characters always feel so cheap and fake. Like there is something off about it. Contributing to this miss is the narrator. Although the narrator, Bernadette Dunne, is acclaimed, she is the wrong choice for The House Across the Lake. As mentioned earlier, Casey Fletcher is 35 years old. For reference, Megan Fox is 36 years old. However, Bernadette Dunne is around 60 years old (according to my internet sleuthing).

Radel, Felecia Wellington. "What's really going on in 'The House Across the Lake'? Riley Sager thriller keeps readers guessing". USA TODAY . Retrieved 2022-07-11. Pennington, Gail. "6 mystery novels offer new angles — and a few new favorites". STLtoday.com . Retrieved 2022-07-11.Getting supernatural elements involved muddies things up too much for me and helps to spoil any of the appealing realism in the story. Casey's mother, in an ill-advised effort to help her daughter, ships her off to their Vermont lake house, because we all know being secluded in the middle of nowhere on a lake will make you quit drinking.

I listened to most of the book and the narrator was just okay. The male voicing seemed a bit forced. I had the ecopy and only read maybe 15%. ughhh i loved this book until the main plot twist which was way left field, unrealistic, and unfitting for the genre. i don’t want to spoil anything but i will say that a thriller with everything going completely realistic the entire time shouldn’t have a paranormal plot twist out of nowhere, in my opinion. the whole time i was guessing WHO was causing these things, not WHAT was. i’ll just leave it at that. The author cannot write a convincing female character. This time she was reading into the fact that the wife leaving in the house across the lake would go swim without her wedding ring. Clearly a sign there are issues in her marriage. Did no editor tell him that plenty of people remove them to swim in a lake? Also what was up with her judging the husband for eating frozen burritos when she’s drinking bourbon all day with grilled cheese? Also even though she’s a famous actress, she’s conveniently not into social media.As always, I loved the unique plot & many twists that Sager brought with this book. I could not have guessed in the slightest where this book was going, it was such a ride! Depending on how you break them up, there are multiple twists, but they can mostly be attributed to two different parts of the story, which is where most readers either love or hate it. The House Across the Lake very much feels like the blending of two books into one, which did give a slightly clunky vibe to the overall narrative and a feel that maybe too much is included, while also serving a particular type of plot twist (supernatural theme) that some readers like to know about before going in, as they don't enjoy it. Also, there is very much a dependence on the reader being denied certain information a la Agatha Christie style that ties into a twist, so if any of these things are a hard pass for you, you've been warned upfront. Casey is more developed than the previous main characters in Riley’s other books, but at the same time she feels just like all of the other main characters in his novels. Casey did feel more complex with different motivations and traumas that impacted her personality with her biggest flaw being an alcoholic. When I say alcoholic, I mean drinking to keep her demons at bay constantly. TW: Alcoholism, toxic parent relationship, drugs, death of spouse, domestic abuse, child abuse, suicide

Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense. When it comes to the dialogue and conversations between characters, I also noticed that a lot of things continued to be repeated again to the point where I started to get frustrated because it’s a recurring theme. I’m all about a great story and the development of characters, but why explain a situation and then have that same situation repeated all over again in dialogue? I kept saying to just get to the point already and again, stop dragging things on. Casey is the typical unreliable female narrator that readers see a lot of these days. Namely the main character with a drinking problem that noses her way into everyone else’s business. Usually, this type of narrator would be irksome to me, but in this case, it wasn’t. I think it’s because the reader knows at the outset that Casey’s husband recently passed away, so she’s just processing her grief. Sure, it’s not the healthiest way, but still. After first refusing to go along with her plan to call it an accident, Mark agrees when Carol tells him that they will meet up again later and live off her dead husband's money. However, after the coroner rules the death an accident, Mark does not hear from her, but the still suspicious CID inspector on the case arranges for Mark to find out that Carol has secretly married another old flame and changed residences. Mark angrily confronts her, but she sneers that she only used him and that there is nothing he can do about it without implicating himself. Mark decides to confess, thinking that, although it will probably mean a prison sentence for him, it will mean the rope for Carol. The movie was perfectly paced. The duration of the movie seems short, but it’s enough to get sympathy for the (not many) characters.The film was based on a novel by Ken Hughes, High Wray, published in 1952. [2] It was filmed at Bray Studios. [3] Nicol and Brooke were the only Americans in the cast, although Brooke played a British character, as she did in most films. (Her mastery of a "posh" accent caused her to be typecast as British in Hollywood films starting in the 1940s.) [4] [5] Filming occurred at Bray Studios in Berkshire. [6] Reception [ edit ] It can be tough sometimes being on your own, but Casey being alone at that house was taking it to a whole new level of isolation. Sager paced out the reveals of the before perfectly, in my opinion. It kept me so interested. I’m still giving this a 3* because I enjoy Sager’s style of writing and this could have been more engaging if the twists had been more well placed throughout instead of all left until the end!