Reader’s Notebook, 10/23/25

Just one book in this entry, as I’ve begun a trilogy that might take a week or so and don’t want to forget about this one in the interim.

The House Across The Lake – Riley Sager
I read a couple of Sager’s thrillers last October, and they had a nice dose of spookiness that butted up against the supernatural without being too weird. Most of his books were already claimed at the library and this was the one that remained, so download it I did. I was not disappointed, although it did have a crack or two that bugged me a bit.

In this book Casey Fletcher, an actress whose life fell apart after her husband’s death, is holed up in her family’s Vermont lake house, ostensibly to sober up. Instead, she spends her days drinking and using the high-powered binoculars her husband left behind to look around. One day she sees a swimmer struggling in the center of the lake, so races her boat out to save a woman just before she sunk under the water for the last time.

Turns out that woman is a new neighbor, a retired supermodel who is married to a tech bro. Fletcher and the model strike up a quick friendship, although Fletcher notes that the model and her husband seem to have a strained marriage. She takes to staring into their house across the lake with the binoculars and sees strange things. Arguments. The wife sneaking through the house to look through her husband’s laptop. An actual physical confrontation. Then one day the wife is gone and the husband’s explanation does not add up.

Fletcher’s efforts to uncover the truth are a pretty standard, and entertaining, thriller. Sager hinted at some supernatural elements early but those got pushed aside rather quickly. The final quarter of the book brings those elements back in with a vengeance. So much so that I’m not sure if they worked. Or at least I wondered if I should go back and read the first couple chapters again to see if they jibed with how the book began.[1] Whether they totally align or not, they allow Sager to bring in a massive twist that is a true “Oh shit!” moment, which leads to some solid swings in plot over the last 50 pages.

Mechanics aside, it works, especially when you read it quickly in the spookiest time of the year. I’m not sure I buy into everything Sager did to get there, but the story itself was fun enough that I didn’t care too much about whether the logic totally clicked into place.