This book is an AUDIBLE ORIGINAL- Currently included for Free with the Audible Plus Catalogue at the time of this review.
🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.1/5 | Steam: 🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The House on the Water yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
A group of friends rent a house on the water for a week. By morning one of them is dead. And I called it halfway through. I genuinely cannot believe I got it right.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Setup
Caroline and Esme have been best friends for years with a standing tradition of taking a trip together every year. This year they are joined by Esme’s brother Nick, his husband Ford, and Caroline’s husband John. Caroline’s son has recently been arrested for buying heroin, having dropped out of college and moved in with his girlfriend Darcy who has her own history of addiction. Esme is in the middle of a divorce after almost twenty years. Caroline’s marriage to John is also on the rocks, though she does not yet know the full extent of why.
Esme is not a fan of Ford. She feels she knows nothing about him and it bothers her that he is not working and living off her father’s money. As it turns out, there are very good reasons nobody knows much about Ford, but that comes out later.
The First Night
They are sitting around trading stories when someone asks how Caroline and John met. She admits there was nothing romantic about it. They were set up by a mutual friend who was hoping Caroline would divert John’s attention away from another woman she did not like. He kept dating both of them for months. Ford says she won in the end since John chose her. Caroline says the other woman dumped him because she got tired of it. If she won, it was by default.
That night, when they are all quite drunk, Esme wraps her arms around John and starts dancing with him in a way that reads as more than friendly. John sees Caroline looking at him and peels Esme off. But only once he noticed Caroline watching. At that moment I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Esme drinks way too much. Nick and Ford help her to bed and come back to help clean up. Everyone else eventually heads upstairs.
The Discovery
By eleven the next morning Esme still has not come out of her room. Everyone assumes she is sleeping off a significant hangover so Caroline decides to bring her coffee and wake her up. The room is dark. She flips the light switch. She drops the mug and screams.
Esme is dead.
The police arrive and spend hours searching the home and interviewing everyone. Esme had diabetes and Nick confirms he made sure she took her insulin before bed given how much wine she had. They take everyone’s phones, computers, and fingerprint samples. The detective makes it clear they are not going anywhere for now.
The Suspects
Caroline goes for a walk and John joins her. She tells him her suspicions. Nick is already slated to inherit ten million dollars from their father, who Esme had been increasingly worried about as his health declined. Caroline also mentions David, Esme’s ex-husband, who had told her she would pay for leaving him. Caroline had assumed he meant financially. Maybe he did not.
The following morning police return with new evidence. They are now treating Esme’s death as a homicide. The alarm system shows no one entered the house all night. It was set the entire time. Whoever did this was already inside.
Ford then drops his own bombshell. He tells them why the police are really there. He has a record. Forgery, fraud, and more. He has been to prison more than once. He had never told Nick because he was afraid Nick would assume he was only with him for the money. Nick is visibly devastated when the police tell him about it. John asks Ford directly if that is the case. Ford says no. He loves Nick very much.
What the Police Found
The interviews happen one at a time. Through the window Caroline and Ford watch John’s interview. At one point John completely loses his cool inside. Ford says quietly that he thinks a lot of secrets are going to come out today.
When it is Caroline’s turn the detective leads her somewhere specific. He talks about how people act out of love, jealousy, or money. He eliminates Nick for the inheritance angle. That leaves love or jealousy. And then he asks her directly if she knew Esme was having an affair with her husband.
She says that is ridiculous. They do not even live in the same city. The detective tells her John had not been traveling for work. He was visiting Esme. The affair started eighteen months ago on one of their group trips, the one where Caroline had food poisoning and spent the entire holiday alone and unwell. John had deleted thousands of texts but police found them anyway. In those texts John and Esme professed their love and made plans for a future together. Esme had wanted to tell Caroline. John had told her not to.
Esme was really worried about how Caroline would take it and how it would affect their friendship. I personally think that even if she were honest — there is zero % chance of a salvageable friendship between Esme and Caroline. You sleep with her husband, there’s just no coming back from that lady!
Caroline tells the detective she had no idea. She is lying. She found out three months earlier when she was at Esme’s house and Esme fell asleep. John started texting her. Caroline saw everything. She went home, kept monitoring the texts, and quietly bided her time. She was not going to let them ride off into the sunset bankrolled by Esme’s fortune. After thinking it all through she decided Esme needed to die. And if John could be implicated in her murder, all the better.
The Arrest
The medical report comes back. Esme died of an insulin overdose, four times her normal dose. There was also rohypnol in the wine glass beside her bed. Ford confirms he watched Esme take her insulin that night. The dose had been correct. Someone came back afterward.
Nick lunges at John the moment he hears. The police tell Nick to calm down. They are not there to arrest John.
They turn to Caroline and arrest her.
She does not crack. She tells them she knows nothing about a syringe, nothing about rohypnol. They tell her the syringe was wiped clean of fingerprints, which is itself the problem since Esme would have left her own prints on it if she had given herself the dose. There is a partial print on her insulin jar. And then they tell her about what her son said.
After she found out about the affair, Caroline used her son to connect her with a drug dealer who could supply rohypnol. Her son told the police she told him she would stop paying his legal fees if he did not help her. He gave her up. She says she never threatened him. It is the one claim she disputes, but in her head only.
The book ends without telling us whether she is convicted. We just know she did it, she knows they know, and she is not giving them anything more than she has to.
I called it at the halfway point. The only real clue I had was Esme dancing with John that first night, the way she moved around him like he was hers. When you are drunk your real feelings come out. She thought of him as her man. And John only stepped away once he saw Caroline watching.
What a book.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 — Zero romance, zero heat. This is a closed room thriller about betrayal, a murder, and one very calculated act of revenge. Content warnings for infidelity, drug use, and a murder by insulin overdose.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied with the reveal and frustrated by the open ending in the best possible way. We know she did it. She knows they know. Whether justice actually catches up with her is left deliberately unresolved and it works.
Would I Reread It?
No.
Where to Get This Book
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Crime | Steam: 🔥
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