The House Across the Lake: A Novel

Written by Riley Sager

Narrated by Bernadette Dunne

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Named a most-anticipated summer book by USA Today, People, E! News, Cosmopolitan, PureWow, CNN.com, New York Post, CrimeReads, POPSUGAR, and more 

The bestselling author of Final Girls and Survive the Night is back with his “best plot twist yet.” (People, "Best Summer Books")

Be careful what you watch for . . .

Casey Fletcher, a recently widowed actress trying to escape a streak of bad press, has retreated to the peace and quiet of her family’s lake house in Vermont. Armed with a pair of binoculars and several bottles of bourbon, she passes the time watching Tom and Katherine Royce, the glamorous couple living in the house across the lake. They make for good viewing—a tech innovator, Tom is powerful; and a former model, Katherine is gorgeous.

One day on the lake, Casey saves Katherine from drowning, and the two strike up a budding friendship. But the more they get to know each other—and the longer Casey watches—it becomes clear that Katherine and Tom’s marriage isn’t as perfect as it appears. When Katherine suddenly vanishes, Casey immediately suspects Tom of foul play. What she doesn’t realize is that there’s more to the story than meets the eye—and that shocking secrets can lurk beneath the most placid of surfaces.
 
Packed with sharp characters, psychological suspense, and gasp-worthy plot twists, Riley Sager’s The House Across the Lake is the ultimate escapist read . . . no lake house required.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release date: Jun 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9780593585252

Riley Sager

Riley Sager is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, most recently Survive the Night and The House Across the Lake. A native of Pennsylvania, he now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reviews for The House Across the Lake

[kayla.renae.rhinehart · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a page turner!! I couldn’t put it down!

[beasmom16 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow! Loved the suspense!!! I didn't see that coming, I want more Riley Sager!

[k.cheatham83 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book will have you on the edge of your seat! Just when you think you know what's going on, another twist comes to throw you off. After one of the big twists, I was unsure how it was going to end. And then another major twist happens!

[Aleena · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the first book I’ve read from this author and couldn’t read it fast enough. It was so good, and I’m excited to read more of his work.

[jen_bartels-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well that was bananas!! Just when you think you figured it out...you did not. And then when you think it's all out there, it is not. What a fun ride! Sager you did it again! If you've heard negative things about this book, it may be that the narrator on the audiobook is terrible, and that is 100% correct, thankfully I listen at 2.25 speed so it alters the voice enough to make it a little more palatable. I definitely suggest reading it instead of listening to it.

[jacsun · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book comes with surprises at a mysterious lake in Vermont where someone is intensely watching another with high-powered binoculars.

Casey’s family has owned property at Lake Greene for generations and she is staying at the house temporarily to get a handle on grief and alcohol consumption. It doesn’t work. She enjoys not one but several glasses of bourbon every day. She sees someone from across the lake who appears to be drowning and scrambles to help her. It’s Katherine. She gets her in her boat and manages to save her. Her husband, Tom, is so grateful, he shows up with his wife later at her place with two bottles of wine to share – each with a $5,000 price tag. How can she say no to that?

She is entertained with her binoculars during the quiet evenings looking at Tom and Katherine in their beautiful $5 million glass house across the lake. Katherine is a former super model and walks with an “effortless grace of a ghost.” Her net worth is $35 million and she worries that her husband needs her too much. Casey can’t seem to take her eyes off of everything they do. That’s where the story gets interesting.

Each character is well-developed -- some to the point that made me despise them. I wanted the actress, Casey, to stop spying on her neighbors and put the drinks down. Maybe I was the one that needed a drink. I felt sorry for her neighbor, Boone, who was grieving for the death of his wife. Just as I thought I was able to predict the ending, the book took a peculiar turn. It’s where anything can happen and you just have to smile.

[bookofsecrets · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book made me think of The Woman in the Window and the Kristen Bell thriller parody on Netflix. The protagonist in Riley Sager’s latest is an alcoholic woman spying on her neighbors. The wife goes missing, and she decides to investigate.

I’m keeping this as vague as possible. There are a few fantastic twists in this book, but one of the big ones I had figured out very early on, then I was annoyed with myself for ruining the surprise. Ha.

I thought the pacing was a bit slow during the first half or so, then things got kind of wacky. THE HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE was entertaining for the most part, but it was no HOME BEFORE DARK. That one scared the crap out of me, and I loved every minute.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

After the death of her husband, actress Casey Fletcher has holed up in her family's lakeside summer home, where she does very little besides drinking... until the day she saves her across-the-lake neighbor, a former supermodel, from drowning, then finds that she can't keep herself from spying on the woman and her husband in their all-glass house. And something weird and dramatic seems to be happening over there.

So. There's a problem I often have with thrillers like this, that all but shout "Hey, there is AN INCREDIBLE TWIST in this one!" from the dust jacket before you even open them. Which is that I spend far too much of my time while reading trying to imagine what the INCREDIBLE TWIST might be, and I can imagine enough possibilities that whatever it is, it likely will involve something I've already thought of. Well, that's true for one or two of the INCREDIBLE TWISTs in this one, but not all of them. Mainly because the biggest of them is batshit insane.

Which, in itself, isn't a problem, actually. I've enjoyed stories with batshit insane twists before. But I think there are some important criteria for a good twist, batshit or otherwise, and it may be that the crazier it is, the more important it is to get it right. Ideally, a narrative twist should recontextualize everything we already knew, or thought we knew, about what's going on in the story in a way that snaps everything into a new and clearer focus until it all suddenly makes a different, better kind of sense. Done really well, it can lead to a "Holy shit!" epiphany that feels like nothing so much as an orgasm for the brain. What a twist should not do, in my view, is make you feel like the author has been dishonest with you in order to make the twist work. Which is a different thing from having an unreliable narrator, and can be the case even if technically you were never told anything false.

There is one pretty good moment here that made me go "Oh, I see, you didn't actually ever say the thing I was assuming. OK, clever." There was a less-good moment where I was just kind of, "WTF? We're really going here? Well, OK..." And there was a bad one where I genuinely felt like the author had lied to me, or at least misled me in an unfair way. Which might have been less annoying if I'd found more to love in other aspects of the books, but... Eh. It was... fine? Diverting enough, I guess. A quick read, for sure. But I am left sort of wondering whether or not it was actually worth even the relatively short time I took to read it.

[carol420 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother thrill audiences, so it was only natural that she enters the show business profession herself. She never reached the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother had, Casey still made a decent career of bit parts in movies and TV and larger, more professional parts onstage. Then tragedy strikes...the death of her husband. This sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends her career with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi report her substance abuse, her mother sends her off to the family retreat, lake Greene, in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her. The Vermont hideaway doesn't do much except hide her away since she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching her nearest neighbors, Katherine. a former supermodel and Tom, a tech mogul who live across the lake...and she does this through a pair of binoculars. Casey makes friends with Katherine after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon comes to the conclusion that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then... Katherine disappears…. and more creepy coincidences begin to pile up. Eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends she had always heard about Lake Greene just might have more than a smidgeon of truth to them. I have always liked this author. He delivers a story with twists, that cultivates into a more than a satisfying and enjoyable ending. Perhaps there are there some things that didn't quite add up at the end...but that does nothing to spoil this highly entertaining read...it's still a wild ride.

[yshd91 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Weird turn of events. Certainly entertaining but not my cup of tea!

[hazeyrecollect · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book! It was given to me as a gift. I am now looking forward to reading more from Riley Sager!

[thessaly_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Casey is awful (also where’s the show not tell part about her alcoholism?) the end is Meh and it feels like more “twists” than necessary, for a very cheap payoff.

[familiar_diversions · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Casey Fletcher is a widowed actress whose drinking problem, acquired after her husband's death, has all but ended her career. Her mother has banished her to the family vacation home by Lake Greene, but since that's also where Casey's husband, Len, drowned to death, it's questionable whether she's any better off there than she was when she was in the public eye.

Casey is trying out Len's old binoculars when she sees someone drowning in the lake. Thankfully, she gets there in time to save famous model Katherine Royce's life. Katherine and her husband Tom have recently moved into the house across the lake from Casey's, and Casey finds herself spying on the couple. Gradually, she comes to the conclusion that there's something going on in the Royce household, and when Katherine seemingly disappears, Casey is sure Tom had something to do with it.

Maybe I've been reading too many thrillers, but the first half of this book felt really stale. The perpetually drunk main character (I don't drink, and even I felt like I might go into sympathetic liver failure while reading about Casey's constant drinking). The suspicious interactions between husband and wife. The scene shifts between past and present, with an omission so obvious that the book's first twist felt half-hearted at best.

There was more going on than there initially appeared to be, and although those developments did take me by surprise, I'm not sure I can say that they were any good. Mostly, they just struck me as ridiculous. That feeling only grew more pronounced when Sager managed to fit a few more twists in before the book's final pages.

It wasn't necessarily a terrible way to spend a few hours, but overall my feelings are lukewarm at best.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ummm...well....this is a suspense thriller sort of story, told in first person present tense "Now" sections, and first person past tense "Before" sections. It includes a fair amount of misdirection and convenient omissions by our unreliable narrator, an actress who has been banished by her mother to the family's house on a secluded lake in Vermont, where she's supposed to stay out of the public eye and get a handle on her drinking. Her husband drowned in this lake a little over a year ago, and it seems an extremely cruel and probably hopeless situation she's been railroaded into. Still, she has no intention of giving up the booze, and routinely lies to her mother about it. In fact, she lies a fair bit to other people too, so it's no surprise to discovery she's lying to the reader...but what's the TRUTH, then? I had several quibbles with the writing style here--a lot of repetition and belaboring the obvious. There's a decent psychological mystery embedded in there, though, and a few quite clever bits of clue-dropping, but the whole thing just didn't work well for me. I never got lost in the story the way one really should with this kind of tale. YMMV.

[srms.reads · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

2.5⭐

After a drunken debacle causes her to lose her latest role and earns her bad press, 35-year-old actress, Casey Fletcher retreats to her family’s vacation home on Greene Lake in Vermont. A little over a year ago, Casey's husband drowned in the lake which seems to have triggered her alcohol dependence. Haunted by her memories, she spends most of her time in an alcohol-induced haze and spying on her neighbors with her late husband’s binoculars. The “house across the lake” is owned by a power couple - tech entrepreneur Tom and his wife Katherine, a famous model. After saving Katherine from drowning in the lake, Casey and Katherine become friendly. Casey witnesses ( with her binoculars, of course) what she thinks is a disagreement between the couple ( very “Rear Window”, which coincidentally was her and her late husband's favorite movie), and when Katherine disappears, Casey suspects that Tom had something to do with it. As Casey tries to find out what happened to Katherine, she seeks the help of Boone Conrad, an ex-cop who is temporarily staying in the neighborhood while doing some work on another resident’s home, who also has secrets of his own. Will Casey be able to find Katherine before it is too late?

To be honest, up to the 70% mark, the story seemed formulaic –alcoholic protagonist/unreliable narrator, Rear Window style snooping into a neighbor’s window witnessing an altercation of sorts between a couple in a presumably troubled marriage, the wife goes missing and then alcoholic nosy neighbor becomes alcoholic super sleuth et cetera et cetera. Long-drawn and overly descriptive, I found the first half of the novel more than a tad boring. But then, everything I predicted turned out to be WRONG! Usually, I love being proved wrong but in this case, I would have preferred a predictable ending. While the initial 70% was boring and unoriginal but readable, the final segment and the major twist made things worse. Given the time I had already invested in the book, I forced myself to finish it. I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the weird direction the story took but yes, I was surprised as all my theories got tossed into the lake! Though not quite original in concept, Riley Sager’s The House Across the Lake is suspenseful and twisty and I can see how it might appeal to others but unfortunately, it did not work for me!

[authorjanebnight · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Synopsis: An actress hides at her lake house after the untimely death of her husband. She rescues a woman from drowning and starts to fear that the woman in question is in danger.

My rating: 4/5

This book had a slow start for me and I struggled to get through the beginning of it but it did pick up and when it did I couldn't put it down.

This book has some neat twists and turns. A few I saw coming but several I did not.

I found I really enjoyed the setting more than I expected to. It felt isolated and desolate as it is the off season at the lake where most residents are only there seasonally. The lake is clearly shown as ominous and I liked the way it was used both in the plot and the mood of the book.

One of my biggest struggles with this book was that I didn't like any of the characters. Our narrator was unsympathetic, partially due to her alcoholism, and right off the bat I didn't feel like we could trust her.
Throughout the book she makes really bad decisions and so many times I was just growling at her character in frustration.

My lack of attachment to any of the characters made me minimally invested in the things that were happening to them.

At the end of the day I liked the setting and plot but didn't care about any of the characters. The twists were fun and unexpected but also I wasn't prepared for them (though if I had read more from this author I probably would have been).

I am not sure who the right audience for this book is. Maybe people who like Stephen King books.

[lynnmpk · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This reads like a parody of the mystery thriller genre. I don’t know if that’s what the author was going for though. It was readable and kept my interest well enough.

[kiaya40 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked this more than I thought I would, but it was a little bit crazy, the idea/concept presented relating to death/life after death. It did have some language, which is kind of the norm for books by Riley Sager. Anyway, this book kept my interest, but after I was done I wasn't sure what I just read lol. It was kind of wacky with the twists and everything.

[postsbygina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The House Across the Lake was an intriguing story. It reminded me quite a bit of Hitchcock's The Rear Window starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly (which was referenced in the book itself) but with an unexpected twist.
The story takes place at Lake Greene in Vermont, and follows widowed actress Casey Fletcher as she attempts to solve what she believes is a murder in the quiet lakefront community.

Casey’s drinking results in her getting fired from acting, and banished to her family’s lake house. While there, she passes the time with too much drinking and a pair of binoculars for what ends up being too much snooping into the house across the lake.

As you read this you think you know where things are going. The structure is a familiar one of most crime thrillers but then woah. I’m sorry. Come again? You’re shaking your head. You’re doing a double, no, a triple maybe a quadruple head shake because the unexpected rushes into your face like a bat out of nowhere in an old attic.

[nyiper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh my goodness the twists and turns in this book....turning things up-side-down more than once. A very fast read because it's almost impossible to put down!

[flourgirl49 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book was percolating along fairly nicely, and then about two-thirds of the way through, it went completely off the rails into fairy tale land. It was totally unexpected, and I read the rest of the book shaking my head and sniggering at how ridiculous it was. Not to mention that the main character is obnoxious and thoroughly unlikable. I have liked Riley Sager's previous books, but this one was really bad.

[spaceandsorcery · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

When I started reading The House Across the Lake I was already aware that this mystery/thriller contained a huge, supernatural twist thanks to the review of fellow blogger Mogsy who had showcased this book previously, so when it happened (and Mogsy’s comparison to Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes was indeed spot-on) I was not surprised, nor put off, but still I would like to warn potential readers who don’t enjoy the addition of the uncanny to their thrillers that this kind of element is there.

The story focuses on Casey Fletcher, a former actress whose career floundered after the tragic death of her husband: she’s now a grief-stricken alcoholic who stopped caring long ago about the media frenzy over her drunken public appearances. Casey’s mother sent her to the family’s lake-house in Vermont to keep her out of the media’s voracious eye, and with the not-so-high hope of sobering her up, but unfortunately the choice of location is the wrong one since Len, Casey’s husband, drowned in the same lake on whose shore the house stands, so that heartbreak and loneliness are driving Casey to drink practically nonstop from morning to night.

Something however breaks that self-destructive routine when one day Casey spots someone in danger of drowning in the lake: taking to her boat, she’s able to save the person, only to discover that it’s Katherine Royce, a famous former model and her neighbor on the other side of the lake, where the woman lives with her husband Tom in a new house whose big glass windows seem to invite a peek into the life of the rich and famous Royces. And that’s exactly what Casey starts to do, pointing her binoculars at the Royces’ house and seeing that apparently her neighbors’ marriage is not the modern fairy-tale told by the tabloids; so, when Katherine suddenly disappears, Casey becomes convinced that Tom must have killed her, and she launches into an alcohol-fueled, often messy crusade to uncover the truth. Only to discover that appearances can be very, very misleading….

It’s going to be very difficult to write about this book while steering away from spoilers, particularly where that famous narrative twist is concerned, but what I can and will share are the reasons why this book proved quite disappointing - and certainly not for the supernatural element: being aware that it would be there made me look forward to it, curious about what it would be, and it turned out to be an intriguing one indeed, even though it came with little or no foreshadowing, unless one takes into account a passing mention that might very well have been overlooked. No, what disappointed me were the characters and their actions, which often made little or no sense, and a feeling of… narrative flimsiness - for want of a better definition - that employed some well-known tropes without trying to invest them with some much needed uniqueness.

Casey takes of course the role of unreliable narrator (and toward the end we will discover just how unreliable…), but she is also an unsympathetic character I could not drive myself to care about: we are told that she’s grieving for the death of her husband, and we see her trying to drown that grief in the bottle, but I never truly felt her pain. If her alcohol-induced fugue state was a way of expressing that sorrow, I’m afraid it did not work for me; what’s worse, at some point we learn about a certain dramatic revelation from the past, and Casey’s harsh choice in dealing with it, but I’m afraid that the too-short time frame from discovery to action made the whole sequence totally unbelievable, because there was simply no time for her to truly process that momentous epiphany. I apologize if this sounds cryptic, but to do otherwise would lead to spoilers…

The other characters fare no better, from the potential victim’s husband’s suspicious attitude, to the avuncular protectiveness of the older neighbor, to the appearance of an attractive neighbor/caretaker who might be a romantic interest, they are barely sketched figures that left no lasting impression and serve only as a sort of foil for Casey’s reckless and ill-advised choices. I held some hope once the true villain of the story was revealed - and here I have to acknowledge that the author managed to work some very successful red herrings here in the narrative transitions between the “before” and “now” of the various chapters - but the exchanges with Casey destroyed that hope because instead of the hoped-for dramatic effect they bordered on the grotesquely outlandish and robbed those scenes of the required emotional impact.

As I said the weird element in the novel was an intriguing one, and being a fan of horror themes I did not find it objectionable, even though it might have been introduced a little more organically: what I find hard to accept is that the… phenomenon, let’s call it that way, did not manifest itself sooner and lay in wait for a very long time before coming to the surface, considering that there were many opportunities for that to happen before Casey’s arrival on site. And as a last complaint, I must add that once the main story seems to have reached its climatic end, we are treated to a second dramatic revelation, which not only steals the wind from the main ending, but adds what I felt was a ludicrous note by having a second baddie threaten Casey - I kid you not - with a five thousand dollars bottle of wine. If this sounds as insane as it is unbelievable, it’s because it IS.

In the end, I’ve come to view The House Across the Lake as a bundle of missed opportunities that turned what was a potentially intriguing story into an alcohol-soaked mess. From what I’ve seen online, this does not seem to be the author’s best offering, but still I’m not exactly encouraged to explore further….

[amyghilton · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very reminiscent of Rear Window and several other recent thrillers from writers like Ruth Ware and A.J. Finn.

[pdebolt_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I think that I am as willing as most readers to suspend disbelief if the character and plot developments are good; however, this book falls into a new category for me - preposterous. There was mild suspense and speculation that involved the missing woman. When she was found, the entire plot dissolved into ludicrous. Riley Sager is a talented author, but count me way out for this one.

[ecataldi-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was definitely got Girl on the Train/ The Woman in the Window vibes from this book because the main character is a falling down drunk and doesn't seem like the most reliable narrator on the planet. Casey Fletcher is a notorious drunk, she used to be a successful actress, but after her husband died she turned to the bottle and started her very public descent of despair. Eventually the public stops sympathizing with you the more you drink. Casey's mother (an even bigger celebrity) has decided to exile Casey to the family lake house to keep her out of the public eye and maybe even get sobered up. All alone and trapped at the place where her husband died, Casey immediately falls back to the bottle and takes to spying on her wealthy neighbors across the lake with a pair of binoculars. They have a huge glass house and when the lights are on at night it's easy to see everything that goes on. One night while she is drinking and spying she sees something that makes her blood run cold. But what if it's all in her head? A fast paced suspenseful novel that will keep you guessing right up to the deliciously unexpected twist at the end.

[candyh_64 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I’ve been a Riley Sager fan for a long time but this was one of the strangest books I ever read. It truly is not one of his best books.

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Casey Fletcher is a recent widow, after her husband drowned in the lake last summer. She drowns her loneliness and the end of her career by drinking all day and watching her neighbors with her husband's binoculars.. When she rescues Katherine from the lake, she becomes involved with the couple. Then, Katherine disappears, and Casey suspects Katherine's husband, Tom, of foul play.
As Casey investigates the disappearance, she has to face some secrets and truths about her husband.
You have to suspend disbelief as you read this book. When things become ridiculous and implausible, the book loses its luster.

[celticlibrarian · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A washed up alcoholic actress lives alone in the family house on Lake Greene in Vermont. She spies on her neighbors using the binoculars left behind by her recently drowned husband, Len. As days go by, she becomes really interested in the couple who live directly across the lake - The Royces. Something strange is going on in that house and Casey Fletcher is determined to get to the bottom of it all.

If you are looking for a straight forward suspense or psychological thriller, this is not the book for you. To say it bordered on the preposterous might be a little strong, since this is fiction after all, but toward the last third of the book the author really goes way out there. That twist is what turned me off to the rest of the book and I ended up severely disappointed despite having read and generally enjoyed all of this author’s previous stories. I can’t say more without spoilers, so just leaving it here that I wish I had not wasted my time.

[micareads · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Casey Fletcher, an actress, is sent to the family cabin to sober up after being caught drinking by the paparazzi. At the cabin, she is haunted by the memory of her husband who passed away in their lake the year prior. She discovers that her newest neighbors are former model, Katherine, and her social media CEO, Tom. As Casey sits on her porch in a drunken fog, she sees a hand poke out of the water and realizes someone is drowning.

When she goes to help her neighbor, she realized Katherine looks very dead. Katherine spasms to life as she attempts to drag her body back onto the boat. Later that evening, Katherine and her husband Tom cross the river to thank Casey for her help. As the lake residents get to know each other, Casey realizes that maybe their marriage isn't as perfect as it seems.

While spying on the couple with her binoculars, Casey witnesses a fight and then is awakened by a scream that she believes is Katherine. The next day Tom states that his wife has left and returned to the city which Casey does not believe at all. She sets out to find proof that Tom has done something to Casey. Casey gets far more than she bargained for when she finds Katherine and she has quite the story to tell - one Casey is unsure if she should believe.

This was a fantastic new story by Riley Sager. I have come to expect a solid read from Sager but this went above that. I loved everything about this story. There was a mystery on top of mystery on top of mystery but it was all very easy to follow and came to a conclusion I was very happy with.

[silversurfer_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not his best.
A Ho Hum, ridiculous thriller at best.
A bland and vapid homage to Hitchcock's brilliant Rear Window.