Novel
Casey Fletcher, a recently widowed actress trying to escape a streak of bad press, has retreated to the peace and quiet of her family’s lake house in Vermont. Armed with a pair of binoculars and several bottles of bourbon, she passes the time watching Tom and Katherine Royce, the glamorous couple living in the house across the lake. They make for good viewing—a tech innovator, Tom is powerful; and a former model, Katherine is gorgeous. One day on the lake, Casey saves Katherine from drowning, and the two strike up a budding friendship. But the more they get to know each other—and the longer Casey watches—it becomes clear that Katherine and Tom’s marriage isn’t as perfect as it appears. When Katherine suddenly vanishes, Casey immediately suspects Tom of foul play. What she doesn’t realize is that there’s more to the story than meets the eye—and that shocking secrets can lurk beneath the most placid of surfaces.
Novel
The plot of the film, which is in early development, is being kept under wraps, though Riley Sager’s book is centered on a young woman, Maggie, whose family fled their Victorian home 25 years earlier in an event that inspired her father to pen a best-selling nonfiction book claiming they experienced a haunting. Maggie, now an adult, doesn’t remember those events and doesn’t believe her father’s book. But when she inherits the old family home after her father’s death, she starts to question if there’s more to the house than she believed.
