The Lake House – Theo Baxter

Pine Lake seems like a lovely little town. Unless you live there.

Laura thought fiancé Tony was ‘the one’ – until she caught him cheating with her best friend and maid of honor, Mary.

Devastated, Laura moved away and settled in idyllic Pine Lake, where she is just beginning to date again.

But her new life is turned upside down when her next-door neighbor dies in a freak accident . . . and Tony and Mary move in beside her.

Things go downhill fast…

Mary is convinced that Tony orchestrated the move so he could live near Laura and cheat with her. Tony suspects that Mary moved them here so she could stalk Laura, with whom she’s totally obsessed.

For her part, Laura is increasingly uncomfortable with both. Strange things keep happening and she is convinced that someone is watching her.

Then this small community is rocked by a murder, and Laura begins to worry that her very life might be on the line.

And she’s right, she’s in terrible danger. Because this little town is home to a mind that is truly evil…

Review

Yeah, no, actually I didn’t really like this book.

I got really interested in this book because I love thrillers whose cover is a house, and then the setting of a lake house sounded so appealing to me. It actually reminded me of The Couple at Number Nine by Claire Douglas. I liked that book’s setting more, but they both kind of let me down a little bit.

In The Lake House, we follow Laura. Tony and Mary, who cheated on Laura with Mary on their wedding day some years ago, now move in next to Laura. This, combined with two other main characters, makes for a perfect neighbourhood gossip disaster!

Now, I love me some gossipy neighbourhoods, but I just feel like in this book it wasn’t done well. I felt like there were no stakes, even though two people died, but I just didn’t feel anything. I was bored; I felt like the author spent too much time on the romantic side of things that I don’t even know why it was so focused on. It felt like I was reading a thriller with a side of romance.

This is a short book; it’s like 280 pages or so, but it took me almost a week to read it. That’s how the slow pace was.

I still look forward to reading more of this author because I honestly feel like this is an outlier for sure by Theo Baxter.