Book Review: The House Across the Lake

Riley Sager's The House Across the Lake starts off more like a garden variety domestic thriller. It's a setup that harks back to The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window (a novel inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window). A recently widowed actress turns to alchohol to drown her sorrows (and perhaps more) and begins to take an excessive interest in the couple who have recently moved to the house across the lake, spying on them every chance she gets with a pair of binoculars. ("Following someone on social media is just a more acceptable form of spying," the character muses at one point.) One such night of obsessive, intoxication-fuelled snooping makes her suspect that the tech mogul husband may have something to do with the sudden disappearance of his former supermodel wife, little realising that her attempts to investigate the goings-on are about to topple all her own "carefully arranged deceptions." Making the most of the claustrophic setting and an unreliable narrator, Sager stitches together several overly familiar elements with practiced efficiency, only for the story to take a surprising tonal shift midway that turns the story inside out. But unfortunately, therein lies the biggest problem: as plot elements are revealed bit by bit and the full picture becomes clear, one can't help but wonder if the sole intent was to create an element of surprise that isn't so much about misdirection as it's manipulation. A wild, entertaining-if-improbable ride.