The Bookmonger: Lisa Jackson offers another twisted tale<\/p>\n
Published 5:01 pm Wednesday, October 1, 2025<\/p>\n
With over 30 million copies of her novels in print, Oregon author Lisa Jackson\u2019s latest thriller surely needs no boost from the likes of moi.<\/p>\n
But I chose \u201cIt Happened on the Lake\u201d because of timing \u2014 the story is set in the month of October.<\/p>\n
And I found that, despite a rather lumbering start, once I got about 50 pages into this nearly 600-page yarn, I was hopelessly ensnared. Tangled in a hundred different ways, the story threads compelled me to stick with it and sort it out.<\/p>\n
Using the same set of characters, Jackson tells this story in two different decades \u2013 the 1960s, and then 20 years later in 1988.<\/p>\n
In 1968, a cadre of teens has grown up around Lake Twilight in a small town outside of Portland. Now they are about to graduate from high school and spread their wings. Some will go to college, and others off to fight in Vietnam.<\/p>\n
But Harper Reed has something else on her mind. She is pregnant. But on the evening she intends to tell her boyfriend the news, he vanishes \u2013 apparently for keeps.<\/p>\n
And on that very same night, Harper\u2019s grandmother dies \u2013 possibly due to her granddaughter\u2019s lackadaisical care.<\/p>\n
Suspicions swirl \u2013 are these events connected? And in the case of her grandma\u2019s death, was Harper negligent \u2013 or was she guilty?<\/p>\n
The huge Victorian mansion where she has lived with her grandma has already seen more than its fair share of suicides and fatal accidents over the years.<\/p>\n
To protect Harper from malicious small-town gossip, her dad and stepmom pack her off to California, where she can start college in the fall and begin a new life.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to 1988, and Harper is returning to Lake Twilight for the first time in two decades.<\/p>\n
Now divorced, with her own daughter off at college, Harper is at long last claiming her inheritance \u2013 the lake property, complete with the mansion haunted with memories and inhabited by rats and bats.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Her intention is to sell, but on the night she returns, she witnesses a horrible spectacle out in the middle of the lake \u2013 a boat ablaze, with someone who appears to be trapped onboard. In trying to assist in the rescue effort, Harper herself is injured and hospitalized.<\/p>\n
And once again, she is drawn back into the small community\u2019s oversized drama and dark secrets.<\/p>\n
No doubt about it, Lisa Jackson knows how to mastermind plot and manipulate memory. She too-often relies on an annoying device for building suspense, however \u2013 by stacking one-sentence paragraphs atop one another. Here\u2019s just one example:<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was crazy.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomeone was playing with her.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrying to frighten her.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut who?<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd why?\u201d<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the larger problem that readers will grapple with by the end of \u201cIt Happened on the Lake.\u201d Why are all of the characters so unlikeable? Why are they all warped by such serious flaws? Greed and alcohol fuel a share of the bad decision-making, but so does the absence of any meaningful value system.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this weekly column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Pacific Northwest. Contact her at bkmonger@nwlink.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Bookmonger: Lisa Jackson offers another twisted tale Published 5:01 pm Wednesday, October 1, 2025 By Barbara Lloyd…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-56749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}