The House Across the Lake

this book really surprised me because it leaned in a way that riley sager has hinted at in previous books but never fully went into. i don't normally like this type of thriller but riley never disappoints tbh.

in this book we follow casey fletcher who is a semi-famous actress mostly known for smaller roles in tv shows and movies as well as playing the lead in a pretty popular thriller broadway show. there are multiple timelines throughout this book but in the main timeline begins with casey in her familys cabin on lake greene that was built in the 1800s. casey was sent there by her even more famous mother due to a scandal casey got wrapped into. casey tried to perform her broadway show drunk and was thus fired. casey's mother hopes sending her to the cabin will help solve her daughter's alcoholism but throughout the book alcohol is a huge part of the plot which makes casey an unreliable narrator. i wouldn't recommend this book if you'd find that annoying or triggering. casey's drinking started about 14 months prior to the main timeline after the death of her husband because he drowned in the same lake that casey is now forced to reside on by her mother.

while casey is at the lake she ends up saving one of her new neighbors katherine from drowning in lake greene and prevented her from facing a similar fate as her husband. katherine and her husband tom just moved into the house across the lake which is mostly made of glass windows. katherine and casey begin to strike up a friendship after this event over the following couple days after her accident. casey also finds a pair of binoculars her husband left behind and she uses them to spy on her new neighbors thorugh their giant windows. she starts seeing suspicious behavior over the following days between the couple and then suddenly katherine disappears without warning. she begins trying to figure out what exactly happened to katherine and if her husband, tom, had anything to do with it.

while some are definietly going to find casey annoying, i really thought she was just a flawed charatcer who was dealing with real human struggles. sometimes there types of characters can grate on my nerves but this one just didn't. i personally also really enjoy having unriable narrators in thrillers. compared to the main character in riley sager's last release, survive the night, who many people also thought was annoying mostly in part to her unreliableness, i would say casey is less annoying than her for sure. i enjoyed a lot of the side charatcers like boone and eli who are both neighbors of casey—one newer and one a family friend. boone and casey do have a slight romance throughout the story so if you don't like that in your thrillers, i wouldn't necessarily recommend this one but it's not a huge part of the plot. katherine and tome were very interesting to me in the way the really felt like fractions of people since both were celebrities—katherine an ex model and tom a billionaire tech guru who created a new social media app. we also only saw them through casey eyes and what she gathered by spying on them which really helped to create the illusion of not knowing whats's going on.

the writing was the same riley sager, descriptive but not overly distracting, and very digestiable. this book is slightly more lsower paced than osme of his novels but i feel like most of his books tend to be slow until th first 60-70% where the main character is just invesitgating without anything major occuring. then in the last third of the book he generally packs in a lot of action and plot twists and this book was no exception. riley sager's endings always have me shaking in my boots because i absoutly never see them coming but they always click into place perfectly. as stated this one went in a bit of a different route than most of his other books but the vibes were a combination of the last time i lied and home before dark with the unriable narraotr aspect of survive the night. those happened to be my top 3 from him before this book.

overall, while this book was slightly slower paced than some of his others and also went in a different direction, this still had the classic sager intrigue and twists that make his books so consuming and shocking. i don't think this is going to be one that everybody loves but i had an amazing time reading this and i genuinely never wanted to put it down and when i had to, i kept thinking about it all day.

thank you to penguin group dutton, riley sager, and netgalley for an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.