New Book Alert: Lost to The Lake by Anna Willett; Psychological Thriller Peers At The Paranoia of a Fractured Marriage
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Anna Willet's The Family Man focused on a police officer investigating a snuff film created by a man living the guise of a decent family man and moral center of the community. It offers an outsider peering into that facade and exposing the dark truth underneath.
Her novel, Lost to the Lake, shows the insider perspective of what it is like to live in a family like that. It shows what happens during a chilling vacation when a married couple discovers that their spouses aren't all that they appeared to be. They are married to complete terrifying strangers who wear familiar faces.
Marty and Beth seem to have a perfect life together. He owns a thriving business in financial planning. They have a nice home and though childless, they have a loyal dog, Angel whom Beth loves and does upon. Everything seems okay until the night when two men break into their home and hold the couple hostage. Marty apparently "took something from (them)" and now they are here for payback.
The opening is very tense as the two struggle in the dark against their assailants. This also begins to open some subtle cracks in their marriage as Beth begins to see Marry, a man that usually takes charge and can be dependable, as a coward who may abandon her if given the chance and has certainly been keeping secrets from her.
The results are a seriously injured dog who needs veterinary attention and at least one of the intruders dead on the floor. Beth wants to call the police, but Marty refuses since Angel more than likely attacked the man in defense of his humans. Marty says that he is an innocent pawn and didn't know these men were criminals when he did business with him. He could be considered an accomplice
This could be enough evidence to have Marry arrested and Angel put down. The best thing then, Marty suggests, would be to bury the body and get out of town for awhile. Why he even booked a room at the White Mist Lake Retreat while Beth took Angel to the vet ("It will be like couple's therapy," Marty insists, after they drag the dead body into the trunk.) As for the other guy, well he ran off and as long as he doesn't know where they are going, he'll be out of sight and out of mind.
I have read many thrillers and mysteries set in Australia but none have taken advantage of the setting more than Willett has in Lost to the Lake. The White Mist Lake Retreat is one of those places in the middle of nowhere where you could just sense something sinister lurking behind every tree or in every cabin. It's perfect for a thriller or horror.
If your imagination and paranoia doesn't get you, nature will. Remember, this is set in the Australian Outback where there is a lot of land to bury somebody and you can be miles away from anyone who would take a glance.
The Retreat being in this rural out of the way place and near a dark forbidding lake gives the novel a strong sense of abandonment. You could be left there and no one would find you for weeks, if they found you at all.
This sense of abandonment carries over from the setting into Beth and Marty's marriage. As the book continues, Beth begins to see another side to Marty, one that up until now she tolerated. He is snappish, irritable, distant, and suspicious of her friendship with Craig, White Mist Lake's maintenance man. Marty tells lies on top of lies about the night of the break in and his actions afterwards to the point where Beth doesn't know if she can trust him.
It doesn't take long for Beth to review the early times of their marriage and realize that what she once thought of as protective is now controlling.
When Marty was once daring and passionate, she now sees him as temperamental and abusive. What she saw as an intellectual analytical mind is now cold-blooded and arrogant. It takes the break in and their "vacation" for Beth to realize that she had been in an abusive relationship all along and never acknowledged it until now. Beth is not just in a state of physical abandonment from the setting around her but emotional abandonment from the one person that she thought that she could trust.
Lost to the Lake ironically gets lost towards the end after revelations are made and characters double and triple cross each other. The endings go on and on and perhaps a few chapters could be trimmed. This isn't a book that is strong on reveal and resolution, so much as it's strong on atmosphere and dissecting the marriage between the two main characters.
