At a Glance
- Genre: Psychological thriller with supernatural horror
- Setting: A secluded ring of houses on Lake Greene, Vermont (present day)
- Perspective: First-person, dual timeline (“Before” and “Now”), narrated by Casey
Opening Hook
A drowned husband, a bourbon bottle, and a pair of binoculars—this is how Casey Fletcher spends her exile at her family’s lake house. Across the water glitters the perfect life of supermodel Katherine Royce and her tech-mogul husband Tom Royce, until a nighttime rescue binds Casey to the woman she can’t stop watching. When Katherine vanishes and the clues point straight at Tom, Casey and a charming handyman begin to dig—and unearth something far darker than domestic deceit. Because the voice inside Katherine doesn’t belong to her at all. It belongs to Casey’s dead husband, Len (Leonard Bradley).
Plot Overview
Act I: The Window Across the Water
Fourteen months after Len’s fatal plunge into Lake Greene, Casey’s career and sobriety have capsized. Banished by her mother to the family’s quiet lake house, she numbs herself and peers across the water at the Royces—Katherine, luminous but wan, and Tom, sleek, watchful, maybe dangerous. After Casey hauls a flailing Katherine from the lake, the women form a fast, intimate bond. Katherine confesses to fainting spells and marital tension; Casey’s suspicions sharpen as she observes sharp-edged arguments and controlling behavior. Drawn into the orbit is Boone Conrad, a handsome handyman and fellow recovering alcoholic, whose calm steadiness counters Casey’s volatility and hints at a second chance.
Act II: Vanishings, Break-Ins, and the Impossible
One stormy night, after a brutal fight witnessed through binoculars, Katherine disappears. Tom insists she bolted for New York, but the story leaks from every seam—Katherine’s phone is dark, her clothes and rings untouched. Casey and Boone shadow Tom as he buys a tarp, rope, and a hacksaw, then bring their suspicions to Detective Wilma Anson, who listens but with caution. Impatient, Casey breaks into the Royce home and finds proof Katherine didn’t leave. The trail leads to a neighboring basement, where Casey discovers Katherine alive—bound and hidden—just as Tom arrives with a shattering claim: he’s not hurting his wife; he’s containing a presence inside her.
The entity in Katherine’s body speaks with intimate, chilling knowledge. It calls Casey by pet names only Len used. And then it says the unsayable: Len has returned, riding in Katherine’s skin.
Act III: The Drowned Truth
The revelation rips open the sealed “Before.” Casey had uncovered Len’s other life—three missing local women, his predatory lies, the darkness behind the charming husband. Terrified and resolute, she drugged him, rowed him to open water, and watched him sink beneath Lake Greene, staging an accident later “discovered” by neighbor Eli Williams. Len, now animating Katherine, taunts her with that murder and with the hell he endured below the surface, claiming he seized Katherine’s body the instant she died during her near-drowning.
Casey realizes the only way to end it is to play along. She “rescues” Len-as-Katherine from Tom’s barricade, bargaining for the victims’ burial sites. He directs her to a petrified stump in the lake—his underwater shrine of secrets.
Act IV: A Last Gambit—and What Surfaces
To free Katherine and keep Len from leaping to another body, Casey offers him hers. She initiates a transfer, then drops herself—now carrying Len—into the lake, lashed to an anchor. But Katherine, newly freed, dives in and drags Casey up. Len’s spirit slips back into the black water, unfixed and furious.
On shore, the final twist breaks: Tom had indeed been poisoning Katherine, plotting an “illness” inspired by a stage role Casey once played. He attacks; Casey fights back and kills him as the police arrive. In the quiet “Later,” on New Year’s Day, the lake yields its dead where Len directed, and Casey—sober, steadier, tentatively in love with Boone—leans on her mother, cousin Marnie, and Katherine. With Wilma’s discreet help, the full truth of Casey’s vigilante justice stays buried. The lake, however, keeps its own counsel. Something still moves in its depths.
Central Characters
For a full cast, see the Character Overview.
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Casey Fletcher: A once-famous actress turned unreliable witness to her own life. Casey’s drinking masks grief and a lethal secret, but her arc bends toward agency: from watcher to rescuer, from liar to truth-teller. Her willingness to drown with Len inside her reframes her as a flawed heroine seeking a hard-won atonement.
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Katherine Royce: Introduced as a glossy ideal—beautiful, generous, almost ethereal—Katherine becomes the story’s pivot. First saved, then possessed, and ultimately the savior who dives for Casey, she embodies resilience: a woman stripped of bodily autonomy who claims it back.
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Tom Royce: Crafted as the obvious villain—controlling, suspicious, cold—Tom’s midstream rebrand as a desperate “protector” complicates our judgment before snapping into clarity: he really was poisoning Katherine, weaponizing her weakness for profit. His arc is a study in misdirection and rot.
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Len (Leonard Bradley): The charming ghost of domestic bliss, revealed as a serial killer and, later, a parasitic force from the lake. Len’s manipulations—alive and dead—turn intimacy into horror, making him the novel’s true engine of evil and the test of Casey’s courage.
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Boone Conrad: A steady counterweight to Casey’s chaos. His sobriety, patience, and quiet competence reintroduce the possibility of trust. Boone isn’t a savior; he’s a partner, nudging the story from toxic fixation toward healthier attachment.
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Detective Wilma Anson: A methodical skeptic who keeps one eye on the rules and one on justice. Wilma’s guarded faith in Casey—and her pragmatic silence later—grounds the novel’s wilder turns in human judgment.
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Eli Williams: The unassuming neighbor whose earlier “discovery” of Len’s body stitches past and present. Eli’s local lore about the lake lends the supernatural an eerie plausibility and deepens the setting’s mythos.
Major Themes
For a broader map of ideas, see the Theme Overview.
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Deception and Misleading Appearances: Sager builds a hall of mirrors where marriages, memories, and even bodies deceive. Tom looks like a brute, then a protector, then a monster; Len looks like a dream husband, then a killer, then an incorporeal predator. The novel keeps asking how much we ever truly see—even when we’re looking straight at it.
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Trauma, Grief, and Substance Abuse: Casey’s alcoholism blurs the line between perception and paranoia, forcing readers to sift truth from intoxication. Her drinking becomes a coping mechanism for layered trauma—bereavement, betrayal, complicity—showing how pain can curdle into self-erasure before it becomes resolve.
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Voyeurism and Obsession: The binoculars are both a plot device and a metaphor. Watching the Royces lets Casey avoid her own wreckage, but it also entangles her in danger, echoing Rear Window while interrogating the ethics of looking: when does observation become intrusion, and when does it become responsibility?
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Guilt and Atonement: Casey’s private execution of Len haunts every choice she makes. Her final gambit—to drown with Len inside her and to recover his victims—transforms guilt into action, reframing justice as something imperfect, personal, and costly.
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The Supernatural and Possession: The lake isn’t just a setting; it’s an appetite. By fusing a domestic thriller with body snatching, the book argues that evil can outlive the body and that the past, like dark water, rises if disturbed.
Literary Significance
The House Across the Lake is a bold genre collision: a glossy, Hitchcockian domestic thriller that swerves into ghost story without blinking. The mid-novel possession twist retools familiar tropes—unreliable narrator, troubled marriage, missing woman—into a meditation on what lingers after harm is done, and who must bear it. Sager’s risk pays off in pace and audacity: misdirection doubles as critique of spectatorship, while the lake itself joins the canon of sinister American landscapes. As a contemporary entry in the “page-turner with teeth,” it matters for its willingness to break the rules, test reader allegiance, and make the act of looking feel thrilling—and dangerous.