I really enjoyed this book! It was given to me as a gift. I am now looking forward to reading more from Riley Sager! ( )

Casey is awful (also where’s the show not tell part about her alcoholism?) the end is Meh and it feels like more “twists” than necessary, for a very cheap payoff. ( )

Casey Fletcher is a widowed actress whose drinking problem, acquired after her husband's death, has all but ended her career. Her mother has banished her to the family vacation home by Lake Greene, but since that's also where Casey's husband, Len, drowned to death, it's questionable whether she's any better off there than she was when she was in the public eye.

Casey is trying out Len's old binoculars when she sees someone drowning in the lake. Thankfully, she gets there in time to save famous model Katherine Royce's life. Katherine and her husband Tom have recently moved into the house across the lake from Casey's, and Casey finds herself spying on the couple. Gradually, she comes to the conclusion that there's something going on in the Royce household, and when Katherine seemingly disappears, Casey is sure Tom had something to do with it.

Maybe I've been reading too many thrillers, but the first half of this book felt really stale. The perpetually drunk main character (I don't drink, and even I felt like I might go into sympathetic liver failure while reading about Casey's constant drinking). The suspicious interactions between husband and wife. The scene shifts between past and present, with an omission so obvious that the book's first twist felt half-hearted at best.

There was more going on than there initially appeared to be, and although those developments did take me by surprise, I'm not sure I can say that they were any good. Mostly, they just struck me as ridiculous. That feeling only grew more pronounced when Sager managed to fit a few more twists in before the book's final pages.

It wasn't necessarily a terrible way to spend a few hours, but overall my feelings are lukewarm at best.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )

Synopsis: An actress hides at her lake house after the untimely death of her husband. She rescues a woman from drowning and starts to fear that the woman in question is in danger.

My rating: 4/5

This book had a slow start for me and I struggled to get through the beginning of it but it did pick up and when it did I couldn't put it down.

This book has some neat twists and turns. A few I saw coming but several I did not.

I found I really enjoyed the setting more than I expected to. It felt isolated and desolate as it is the off season at the lake where most residents are only there seasonally. The lake is clearly shown as ominous and I liked the way it was used both in the plot and the mood of the book.

One of my biggest struggles with this book was that I didn't like any of the characters. Our narrator was unsympathetic, partially due to her alcoholism, and right off the bat I didn't feel like we could trust her.
Throughout the book she makes really bad decisions and so many times I was just growling at her character in frustration.

My lack of attachment to any of the characters made me minimally invested in the things that were happening to them.

At the end of the day I liked the setting and plot but didn't care about any of the characters. The twists were fun and unexpected but also I wasn't prepared for them (though if I had read more from this author I probably would have been).

I am not sure who the right audience for this book is. Maybe people who like Stephen King books. ( )

Ummm...well....this is a suspense thriller sort of story, told in first person present tense "Now" sections, and first person past tense "Before" sections. It includes a fair amount of misdirection and convenient omissions by our unreliable narrator, an actress who has been banished by her mother to the family's house on a secluded lake in Vermont, where she's supposed to stay out of the public eye and get a handle on her drinking. Her husband drowned in this lake a little over a year ago, and it seems an extremely cruel and probably hopeless situation she's been railroaded into. Still, she has no intention of giving up the booze, and routinely lies to her mother about it. In fact, she lies a fair bit to other people too, so it's no surprise to discovery she's lying to the reader...but what's the TRUTH, then? I had several quibbles with the writing style here--a lot of repetition and belaboring the obvious. There's a decent psychological mystery embedded in there, though, and a few quite clever bits of clue-dropping, but the whole thing just didn't work well for me. I never got lost in the story the way one really should with this kind of tale. YMMV. ( )