The author had me reading raptly until page 246, when there was suddenly a completely ridiculous plot move. This was completely insulting to me as a reader. Sorry, I can't say more because it would require a spoiler! But I stopped reading there and would have thrown the book against the wall, except that it was a library book.

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Well, that didn't turn out the way I expected. Usually I'd say that's a good thing in a book, but this one veered so far off course that it was laughable. I will read pretty much anything from Riley Sager, so I was glued to the pages until around the halfway point. By then, Casey's daily log of her drinks (vodka, more vodka -- sometimes with ice, sometimes without, bourbon, sketchy rum from a dusty bottle she found in a crawlspace) got to be the main topic so I skimmed. By skimmed, I mean I skipped entire pages desperately hoping for the book to get better.

Then suddenly, I thought it did! Until a couple of major twists appeared, making me cough out a chuckle and wondering if maybe Casey was just off on a drunken hallucination. Nope, it was the actual story.

Two stars because at least the author proved that super rich celebrities can have problems too. The same celebrities who have nothing better to do than drink all day and spy on their neighbors with binoculars.

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Strange Book!
Started out as a solid mystery/thriller, then with only 100 pages left it veered totally off course and became a weird supernatural/horror novel.
I almost stopped reading, but did finish, and although I wasn't happy, the author did manage to somehow pull it all together so at least there was some type of plausible ending.

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Okay, this novel seemed very familiar (at least at first). The protagonist and first-person narrator is Casey Fletcher, an actress who has been recently widowed and is now living in her family's lake house in Vermont. Her husband drowned in the lake which leads to her daily binge with alcohol (mostly vodka and bourbon). Across the lake in a glass-windowed mansion lives a former model and her husband, Tom and Katherine Royce. Casey spends her time with a high-powered pair of binoculars that she uses to watch Tom and Katherine. Then Casey saves Katherine from drowning and strikes up a friendship with her but her spying on them shows that their marriage isn't perfect and when Katherine disappears, Casey fears the worst and thinks Tom has possibly killed her and disposed of her body. The police gets involved and Casey just keeps on drinking. And then there is a very unexpected and unusual twist to the story about two-thirds into it. So what is really going on?

Well, this of course reminded me a lot of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart spying on his neighbor who he thinks has committed murder. In fact, this movie is mentioned in the novel. There are other Hitchcock references as well: Casey's cousin is named Marnie (another Hitchcock movie) and a play Casey was last in is called Shred of Doubt, very close to the Hitchcock movie Shadow of a Doubt. Overall, I was kind of so-so on this novel. The first part seemed to go on too long and was sometimes very repetitious with Casey's drinking and her suspicions about Tom. Then the twist to the story was very bizarre and took the novel down a totally different path that I really was not on board with. Based on this one, I probably won't be reading any others by this author.

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