If any book needed a spoiler discussion, it’s The House Across the Lake! What. Is. Happening? Let’s figure it out together. Find a plot summary, character list, neighborhood guide and the ending explained in my Spoiler Discussion for The House Across the Lake.
Spoiler Discussion for The House Across the Lake
Here’s what this post will contain:
Character List for The House Across the Lake
Lake Greene Neighborhood Guide for The House Across the Lake
Plot Summary for The House Across the Lake
What Was the Ending of the House Across the Lake
Spoiler Discussion
Character List for The House Across the Lake
Casey Fletcher: widowed broadway actress with a drinking problem
Tom Royce: CEO of Mixer, a tech company
Catherine Royce: Tom’s wife, a former supermodel
Lolly Fletcher: Broadway actress and Casey’s mom
Leonard Bradley: Casey’s husband; drowned in Lake Greene
Detective Wilma Anson
Marnie: Casey‘s cousin; lives in Manhattan.
Eli Williams: Lake Green resident and a novelist who was big in the 80s. After his wife’s death, he moved to Lake Greene full-time.
Boone Conrad: handyman for the Mitchells
Neighborhood Guide to The House Across the Lake
The House Across the Lake is set at Lake Greene in Vermont. Five houses sit around the lake:
The Fletcher house is the oldest house on the lake, built in 1878
The Mitchell house is next door to Casey Fletcher’s house.
The Royce house sits on the other side the lake. It was built twenty years ago on the former site of a bungalow. It’s modern, with an all-glass side facing the water.
The Fitzgerald house is a charming cottage on the Royce side of the lake.
Eli Williams’ house is a ramshackle chalet style cabin to the right of the Royce house.
Plot Summary for The House Across the Lake
Prologue:
Casey is talking about childhood memories of spending time at Lake Greene in Vermont with her cousin Marnie
The Present:
Detective Wilma Anson is interviewing Casey. She asks if Casey has been watching the Royce house and tells Casey that Thomas Royce is missing. His car and keys are at the house but he’s gone.
Detective Anson mentions that Casey broke into the Royce house. When the detective leaves, Casey goes to a bedroom where someone is tied up. She asks him what he did with Katherine.
Before:
Casey is at Lake Greene, drinking heavily and thinking about how her husband drowned in the lake the year before.
She hears someone call for help and swims out to find a woman’s body, floating, cold and blue. The woman suddenly wakes up. She’s Katherine Royce, a former supermodel. She and her husband own a house across the lake
Casey gets a call from her cousin Marnie, who thinks the lake is haunted.
Casey grew up hanging out backstage at her mother’s Broadway plays. She married a screenwriter, Leonard Bradley. She recalls the time she and Len vacationed on the lake. One morning a neighbor came to say that their boat was loose. Casey knew Len often went fishing in the mornings. Len’s body was found on the lake shore.
After that, Casey started drinking. She showed up at the theater for a performance drunk and was photographed by the paparazzi and ended up in the tabloids.
Then Casey was sent to the lake by her mom to dry out.
Her mom sent her to the site of her husband’s tragic death? Nice!
Casey starts watching her neighbors with binoculars. She meets Boone Conrad, a handyman who works for the Mitchells.
Novelist Eli Williams, another neighbor, comes over to Casey’s house. He has known her since childhood and is bringing her more alcohol. He tells her that she and Boone have something in common: Boone’s wife died.
Eli stays for dinner. Casey, as usual, drinks heavily.
After dinner Tom and Katherine arrive by boat with an expensive bottle of wine. Tom wants to thank Casey for rescuing Katherine from the lake.
Casey thinks Katherine seems afraid of her husband. They all discuss a girl who vanished nearby a couple of years earlier, Sue Ellen Stryker.
Katherine reveals that she and Tom were renting a house there the summer that Sue Ellen disappeared. Eli tells some crazy stories about how the lake traps souls which can then enter the living.
In retrospect, I should have paid attention to this. Did you?
Just before the Royces leave Katherine passes out on the lawn and is very embarrassed about it.
Katherine texts Casey the next morning and comes across the lake to have coffee with her. Katherine tells Casey that Tom needs her too much to agree to a divorce and that he would kill her before letting her leave him. After Katherine leaves, Casey wonders how Katherine got her phone number.
Later that day Casey is watching the Royces again. Casey is convinced that she sees Katherine discovering a secret about Tom on her computer.
Casey sees Tom and Katherine arguing and is sure that Katherine knows the Casey’s watching them. The fight between Tom and Catherine gets physical and she punches him. Casey calls and asks Katherine if everything is OK. Katherine says she’s fine.
Late that night Casey hears a scream from across the lake.
The present:
Casey asks her prisoner what he did to Katherine. First he says he doesn’t know, then refuses to tell her, and finally says that Katherine is in a place where no one will never find her. Casey threatens him with a knife.
Before:
Casey wakes up the next morning and remembers the fight and the phone call and the scream. She texts Katherine and invites her over for coffee. When Casey doesn’t hear back she calls Katherine.
Casey goes to the Royce house by dock to invite Catherine over for cocktails. Tom says Catherine went back to New York City because she didn’t want to be there for the coming storm.
Casey tells Tom she heard a scream on their side of the lake just before dawn. She can see the mark on Tom’s face where Catherine hit him.
Casey texts Katherine again. She calls her cousin Marnie and asks Marnie to go to the Royces’ apartment building in New York and check on Katherine. But Katherine’s doorman said that she’s in Vermont.
Casey decides to use the Mixer app (made the company run by Tom) to check in on the people at the lake. She finds icons showing that Tom, Eli, and Boone are there. Also Katherine, or at least her phone.
Boone comes over to Casey’s and asks her if she also heard a scream the night before. They both agree that it sounded like Katherine screaming and discuss whether they should call the police. Boone tells her that his wife died after falling down the stairs.
Casey and Boone watch Tom with the binoculars and see him unpacking a tarp, a rope, and a hacksaw. Boone says they better call the police.
Detective Anson shows up. Casey and Boone tell her they heard a scream from the Royce’s side of the lake.
Wilma accuses Casey of spying on the Royces. Casey shows Wilma that Katherine‘s phone shows up on the Mixer app as at the lake.
A storm is coming. Casey reads a news story saying that the Mixer app needs money and is seeking investments. In the middle of the night, Casey wakes up to see someone with a flashlight in the woods by the Royce house.
Casey walks across the lake. She sneaks into the Royce house to look for clues. She finds Katherine‘s phone hidden in her underwear drawer. Someone calls Katherine‘s phone and Casey takes a picture of the phone number.
Next, Casey checks out the Royces’ computer. In their search history, she finds that someone was looking up missing women in Vermont. Also Casey’s tabloid story and the article about her husband‘s death.
Casey also finds an article about a man poisoning his wife and decides that when she found Katherine near death in the lake she was being poisoned. She hears a car coming and gets out of the house.
Casey tells Boone about her clues, but he says that none of them are admissible. She believes that Katherine was being poisoned, which explains why passed out on the lawn after they were drinking.
Detective Anson says she’s going to trust Casey with some information: she believes that Tom is responsible for the disappearances of three young women in the area and the Katherine wrote an anonymous note to the police saying that her husband was reponsible.
The present:
Casey asks her prisoner about the missing women and he admits to having something to do with it.
Before:
Boone and Casey decide to start investigating the missing women. Boone seems to think the girls’ disappearances have something to do with the Mixer app.
Casey and Boone are flirting as they spy on the Royce house. They watch Detective Anson show up at Tom Royce‘s house to talk to him.
The next morning, Boone comes to check on Casey. She decides to call the number that she saw on Katherine‘s phone and when she calls it, Boone‘s phone rings. Uh-oh!
The present:
We realize that the man that Casey has tied up is not Tom, because the prisoner asked her what she plans on doing with Tom.
Who is he? My thought at this point was Eli, and that Eli was the serial killer.
Boone says he was just calling Katherine because he was worried about her. Boone said they were close friends but not having an affair and that he didn’t do anything to her. Hmmmm…
Casey does an internet search on Boone Conrad and learns that Boone‘s wife wanted a divorce before she died.
Casey calls Detective Anson and asks if Boone is a suspect. Wilma tells her to stop snooping about everything. Casey drinks some more and begins to wonder if Katherine is actually alive.
The storm arrives. A bit anti-climactic after all that!
Here’s where things really take a turn for the weird!
Casey breaks into the Fitzgerald house and goes to the basement where she finds Katherine tied up. Tom arrives and says that the woman, who looks like Katherine, is not really Katherine.
In fact, an evil spirit entered Katherine‘s body when she almost drowned in the lake. Hey, Eli tried to warn us about this!
Katherine says she’s Len, Casey’s husband. Whaaaatttt?? Len is the evil spirit?
Casey (and all of us) thinks they’re both “bat shit insane.”
Katherine/Len then accuses Casey of killing him/her. Well, then…
Who is Casey’s Prisoner in The House Across the Lake?
Casey is questioning the prisoner who tells her Tom is fine. Casey is convinced her prisoner murdered the three women.
Whoa – so the person Casey tied up is the body of Katherine whom Casey believes is possessed by the spirit of her dead husband Len, who is the serial killer.
WHAT????
Before:
Casey now tells us that (whoops) she forgot mention to the reader that before she got drunk and wound up in the tabloids she discovered that her husband was a serial killer.
Casey! That was important information.
When Casey and Len were at the lake last summer, she needed a lighter. Len said there was one in his fishing tackle box. In it, Casey found some locks of hair and the drivers licenses of missing women.
So … Len sent her there deliberately?
Shocked, Casey checked Len’s alibis for the time the women were killed. For each date he had a hotel reservation and never showed up.
Over dinner Casey drugged Len’s wine with antihistamines. Then she took him out into the boat and got him to admit to the murders and pushed him in the water. Bye, Len!
This is some Verity-level marital problem solving! I’ll link my spoiler post to that down below!
Katherine is screaming that Casey killed her/him.
So Katherine went swimming in the lake, and then Len’s soul entered Katherine’s body, just like Eli described in his crazy story? What happened to Katherine’s soul? Is it now in the lake?
After Casey dumped Len in the lake, she hid his serial killer trophies in the basement wall. Then she staged the scene of Len going fishing in the morning. After that, she got drunk and showed up at work and ended up in the tabloids.
Casey reveals that SHE was the one who wrote the anonymous note that convinced Wilma that Tom was the killer.
Casey unties Katherine/Len but Tom shows back up at the Fitzgeralds. Katherine/Len and Casey trap Tom in the basement and flee back to Casey’s house where she ties Katherine/Len up again.
I can’t even re-read to figure out why that happens.
Wilma shows up.
What Was the Ending of the House Across the Lake
Present:
Len is telling Casey about the murders he committed, using his pet name for her, Cee. The power goes out. Casey finds a lighter in the house and realizes that Len sent her to the tackle box on purpose.
Yes, Casey, we knew that!
Katherine/Len tells her there might be a way to bring Katherine back. Casey goes to get another drink and Katherine/Len escapes. She finds him and Eli shows up and helps Casey tie Katherine/Len to a chair.
How many times has Len/Katherine been tied and untied at this point?
Casey realizes all the missing girls must be in the lake. She kisses Len and sucks his soul out of Katherine, Harry Potter dementor-style. What happens to poor Katherine at this point? She needs to go to the lake to get her soul back.
With Len’s soul now inside her, Casey jumps into the lake. She’s going to kill him once and for all. But why in the lake? That didn’t work before, so I think she should have come up with a more reliable option.
But somehow (?) Len’s soul gets poured back into the lake and Casey is ok. Was her soul in there with Len’s? And was Katherine’s soul somewhere in her body while Len’s was in there. I need WAY more explanation.
Casey, Tom and Katherine come up with a story for the police: after the fight with Tom, Katherine left her phone and took off for an off-the-grid hike to clear her head.
Boone comes to tell Casey that he’s leaving town and that his wife actually killed herself by throwing herself down the stairs. He didn’t kill her!
Casey gives Wilma the drivers licenses and tells her that the girls are in the lake. Wilma guesses that Casey killed Len.
Now that this is all settled, Casey decides to stop drinking.
But wait! Casey suddenly realizes that Katherine said she was feeling weird BEFORE she nearly drowned. Tom really WAS poisoning her to get her money for his app.
Casey tries to call Katherine to warn her but Tom shows up and tells Casey she never should have meddled in all this. He needs Katherine dead. He’s going to kill Katherine and then Casey.
Well, maybe she should have kept Len’s soul inside her, because then HE could have killed Tom!
Tom chases Casey to the lake but she is able to smash him in the head with a wine bottle. They both end up in the lake, under the water.
Casey thinks Tom is dead but he jerks back to life and calls her Cee, Len’s nickname for her.
No way, Len is inside Tom now. Len is the serial killer with nine lives.
Casey stabs Tom/Len in the neck with a piece of glass, killing him.
The police find the missing women in the lake.
The official story form the police: Tom was poisoning Katherine but stopped (and killed) by Casey who also found out her husband was a serial killer before his tragic accident drowning.
Casey stops drinking.
I could use a drink myself. Is Len dead now? Where is Katherine’s soul?
Spoiler Discussion
Wow. Where even to begin?
I assumed this would be a domestic thriller, so I didn’t pay that much attention to Eli’s story about souls drifting around in the lake, waiting to sneak inside someone’s body.
I also remember thinking it was weird that when Casey rescued Katherine, she was blue and cold and seemed dead, but I also shrugged that off.
Did you see the pararnormal stuff coming?
I don’t mind paranormals, but I felt that aspect of the book needed more development and explanation.
Why was Len’s the only soul who seemed to be able to sneak inside bodies? What about the souls of the women? Michele in comments explains that you have to die in the lake to have your soul hanging out in there. The women were killed elsewhere. Okay, that is one thing that makes sense. Relatively speaking! Thanks, Michele!
Had this happened before? It seems like yes, since Eli told a story about it.
Does no one else but Katherine swim in the lake? Or are there other people whose bodies have been taken over?
And what happened to Eli’s wife? I had my eye on Eli for the serial killer, but I was wrong.
On the one hand, I was genuinely surprised to find out that Casey had not kidnapped Tom, but Katherine, who was actually possessed by Len. But on the other hand, the only reason I didn’t figure that out was because it was SO WEIRD.
This book was giving me Lock Every Door vibes, because that Riley Sager book also took a super-weird turn at the end.
PLEASE leave a comment. Don’t leave me with all these questions. I need to know what you thought!
I liked this book up until the paranormal stuff. Then Sager lost me. It was said that Len was the only soul who could sneak into bodies because he actually died in the lake. The women were killed elsewhere and were buried in the lake.
Katherine was drowning because Tom was poisoning her so that’s why her body was able to be taken over I think.
Yes, I agree. It was a really good twist that Len was the serial killer and Casey killed him. But all this soul-swapping was CRAZY.
Thanks for the explanation. Once things went paranormal I was like uhhhhhhh.
So Katherine was almost dead but then Len’s soul revived her? But then when Casey sucks Len’s soul out of Katherine, Katherine should be dead, right? But she’s not.
And then Casey has two souls inside her, Len’s and hers? And then somehow Len’s soul leaves Casey and goes into Tom. I don’t know. This was just a lot of soul transference.
Yes Katherine died in the lake when Len’s soul got into her body because that is the only way
when Casey suck Len’s soul she leaves Katherine’s soul in her body, I believe is because only Len who is already dead can do the little soul shifting
and only people who DIED in the lake have their souls trapped there, that’s why the other girls are not there because they weren’t killed drowning
Len left Casey body because he loved her and he gave her the chance to live again when she was dying in the lake and when Tom died in the lake too Len took the opportunity and got into his body
now they are both trapped in the lake’s water
Thanks so much for that, Julia. I feel like you are that guy in the meme gesturing to all the photos on the board connected by string and I’m sitting there like ummmm, okay. This book was just too much for me!
I agree that the paranormal was thrown in at the end and the whole flow of the book was ruined. I struggled to listen to the last half hour
I think it could have worked if the paranormal had been set up better. I love a good ghost story!
I was so looking forward to this book. The positives… I loved the twist that Tom was not the person tied to the bed. Loved even more that Casey’s drinking was the result of her guilt. I’m not usually surprised by twists, but finding out her husband was the serial killer and she in turn killed him, really shocked me!
I liked that there were multiple twists, but the possession was just too much for me. It lacked any real “scariness” and was a bizarre choice to me. I would have worked better if a character was using the lore as a means to gaslight an already unstable Casey. As it stands, it just fell really flat for me. It was really hard for me to care about the ending. Although, I do like that it came full circle and Tom was actually trying to kill his wife.
I get that the character Eli was primarily used to introduced the lore of the lake. However, I think he was under utilized. I’m also stunned at how quickly he accepts the idea that Casey’s dead husband is inside someone else. It’s one thing to be entertained by old ghost stories and folklore, but an entirely different thing to so easily believe it to be true. Especially when the person telling you is such a serious alcoholic.
I loved it up until the possession is revealed. It leaves the book just being a meh for me 🙁
I was really excited for this book. It started out really strong, and had some great twists. I was totally caught off guard that Tom was not the person tied to the bed. I also loved that Casey’s drinking was a result of her guilt. However, the book really took a bad turn with the ‘possession’ story line. It wasn’t scary enough to be effective and just seemed a really odd choice. In hindsight, the clues that this was coming were definitely present, but never in a million years would I have guessed that was the direction the book was going. Also, if Len/Katherine had the ability to pass into another person through breath (which we learn when he Len/Katherine kisses Casey) why didn’t Len/Katherine fully pass in to Tom? This would have freed Len/Katherine from being bound to the bed, and given Len a stronger body to utilize. As a serial killer, I think that would be a bonus.
I’m not sure I see the point of the character, Eli. I assume the mention of the dead wife was an attempt to make the reader suspect him as the serial killer, but he was really under utilized. Yes, he introduced the lore of the lake, but otherwise, he wasn’t really needed. I was also amused at how he didn’t question Casey’s explanation of events at all. It’s one thing to enjoy folklore and have an interest in the paranormal, but to just blindly accept that your friend killed her husband because he is a serial killer, and now his spirit has possessed another person is a pretty far stretch. I would have had a million questions that needed answered!
Boone was also a bit of a let down for me. I expected him to play hero and have some sort of redemption moment.
I did appreciate that once the possession wrapped up we found out that Tom actually had been trying to slowly poison and kill Katherine.
Completely agree with everything you said. I MIGHT have been on board with the possession storyline but as you point out, there were inconsistencies. Maybe the transference had to happen in the lake? I don’t know it didn’t seem well thought out. Agree about Eli – I totally suspected him but then he didn’t really have much point in the story. And YES I thought it was enough that Tom was poisoning Katherine and that Casey killed her husband. That was more than enough for me in the surprise twists department!
I haven’t read this but it sounds like an interesting book.
Mary, you might like it! It has a paranormal element.
A highly disjointed and disappointing story full of unnecessary implausible details and ridiculous premises.
Waste of time.
Obviously, Sager has run out of ideas.
Was really enjoying this book, until the paranormal. Won’t even finish it, because I find it absurd!
Too bad it became so weird, because until this, it had a good story line..was anxious to see what happened; don’t really care now!
Sigh…. I agree with this so much. I do like paranormal mysteries. I enjoyed Hidden Pictures. But I don’t like the bait and switch of having a mystery described as a traditional mystery suddenly go paranormal. And yes, this one was a bit absurd!
i feel like you should add a diagram of the events and how they connect the characters throughout the story. i would make one but i personally lost interest in this book at about page 80. i want something that really makes my skin crawl, you know? a real horror book. like the works of Poe or Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark or anything Stephen King.
Ha – I cannot diagram that weird lake stuff. Someone else will have to do that. I think this could have been scary if Sager had leaned into the paranormal stuff right away.
Why did Katherine scream that morning when Casey and Boone both heard it? Did that ever get revealed?
I read the book from the library so I will say with only about 50% certainty that I don’t think it was explained. If I can get my hands on a copy, I will look. If anyone has evidence from the text, tell us!
I, along with most in this discussion, did not enjoy the paranormal turn of events. Especially how Len continued to show back up in the bodies of nearly all the characters. I believe Sager should have ended the book with Casey drowning herself and Len in the book, leaving the readers with the confusion of justice and injustice in one fell swoop. The ending of the book felt like a lazy way to tie up loose strings.
Could not agree more! I enjoy a paranormal thriller but it does feel like cheating to (surprise!) throw in the paranormal stuff at the end.
I really enjoyed The Only One Left though, so I have forgiven him. Have you read it? All loose ends tied – well done!