The Bookmonger: Lisa Jackson offers another twisted tale
Published 5:01 pm Wednesday, October 1, 2025
With over 30 million copies of her novels in print, Oregon author Lisa Jackson’s latest thriller surely needs no boost from the likes of moi.
But I chose “It Happened on the Lake” because of timing — the story is set in the month of October.
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.
Using the same set of characters, Jackson tells this story in two different decades – the 1960s, and then 20 years later in 1988.
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.
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 – apparently for keeps.
And on that very same night, Harper’s grandmother dies – possibly due to her granddaughter’s lackadaisical care.
Suspicions swirl – are these events connected? And in the case of her grandma’s death, was Harper negligent – or was she guilty?
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.
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.
Fast forward to 1988, and Harper is returning to Lake Twilight for the first time in two decades.
Now divorced, with her own daughter off at college, Harper is at long last claiming her inheritance – the lake property, complete with the mansion haunted with memories and inhabited by rats and bats.
Her intention is to sell, but on the night she returns, she witnesses a horrible spectacle out in the middle of the lake – 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.
And once again, she is drawn back into the small community’s oversized drama and dark secrets.
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 – by stacking one-sentence paragraphs atop one another. Here’s just one example:
“This was crazy.
“Someone was playing with her.
“Trying to frighten her.
“But who?
“And why?”
And that’s the larger problem that readers will grapple with by the end of “It Happened on the Lake.” 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.
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