We know from the opening chapter that our first-person narrator has a suspected alleged killer tied to a bed and is brandishing a really ugly knife to coerce a confession.
But that is now and most of this book is about then, as we segue into a very lengthy flashback, only sporadically popping back into now to whet our unsavoury appetites for blood and gore…
Disgraced alcoholic actor and narrator Casey Fletcher is holed up at her palatial summer place on an isolated millionaires’ lake where her husband drowned a year ago, when she goes all Rear Window with her binoculars and soon reckons tech whizboy Tom plans to murder his supermodel wife Katherine.
The House Across the Lake
The House Across the Lake
Her suspicions, however, only start to fester after Casey has rowed out to the middle of the lake and saved Katherine from drowning. Which provides an opportunity for Casey to meet Tom and form an instant dislike.
The House Across the Lake is the sixth thriller written by Riley Sager, which is a pseudonym for American author Todd Ritter, who also writes as Alan Finn. If this seems confusing and complex, The House Across the Lake is light years more complicated and twisted and often improbable and occasionally you-can’t-be-serious than any fiddling around about a writer’s real name.
It is gripping, as any self-aware rip-off of Rear Window would be. In Hitchcock’s classic flick, a laid-up James Stewart has nothing else to do but watch his murderous neighbour. Pretty much the same here, with exceptionally expensive binoculars. The plot is tense, heightened by a rapidly approaching tail end of a (shudder) hurricane.
There are potential red herrings galore. There’s a hunk in the next “cabin,” a widowed former cop named Boone who may have killed his wife.
In a fourth cabin is Eli, an author in his 70s still trying to regain the glory of bestseller lists decades ago. He goes on booze runs for Casey, which we’ll get to soon. How many murder mysteries’ scoundrels turn out to be the one you’d least suspect?
Unless the real villain is Casey — don’t ever trust first-person narrators to be trustworthy, especially with all that booze.
And there’s a fifth cabin, whose owners have closed up for the year. Are we sure?
Why do people keep mentioning the disappearance in the area in recent years of three young women, which, it goes without saying, appears to have nothing to do with the plot?
Casey, maybe we should explain, is the daughter of a famous American actor. She’s followed her mother into a pretty good career as a second banana, usually playing the sister or the star’s best friend. But a year ago, Casey’s screenwriter husband drowned at the lake after going out fishing at dawn, his boat found floating with his fishing tackle, Len washed up in the weeds.
Casey hit the bottle, eventually getting fired for being too drunk to get out even her first line at a successful Broadway murder mystery play, in which Casey played a woman slowly being poisoned by her husband. Hmmmm.
Casey’s mother banished her to the lake to dry out. All alone. Surrounded by booze. Where her husband drowned. If there’s an addictions counsellor in your book club, you could ask if Casey’s mother has gone off her meds under a full moon.
Then, suddenly, the book ludicrously jumps the shark and instantly morphs from murder mystery to an entirely different genre. No, not telling, can’t spoil it.
The book changes, drastically, in a gotcha scene you couldn’t possibly have seen coming.
How drastically? Um, like if we suddenly learn Jack the Ripper is immortal and he lives in that “empty” cabin. Or if there’s a base at the bottom of the lake for submersible UFOs, and aliens also have serial killers. That wild.
Whether you reckon you’ll be able to handle wherever Sager abruptly takes us will determine whether you lay out cash at your favourite independent bookstore or put a hold on the book at the library.
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin wonders how many binoculars are trained on him when he’s out on his balcony. Certainly one or two less than there used to be…
