Katherine and James run a small lakeside resort in a town called Blissful Point, Massachusetts. Together for more than 25 years, they're happy and still as much in love as the day they married. The warm months are perfect, idyllic times spent together running the resort. The winters can be brutal but they have each other and their cat named Barney. It was all they needed.

Then, one summer's day, the child of one of the cabin's tenants decides to slip out of the cabin in the middle of the night. The unthinkable happens when he drowns. James is the one who discovers the small body in the water the next morning. He's devastated at this and slowly begins his descent into what can only be madness.

He stops eating and sleeping. The only time he writes is in a personal journal that he jealously guards from Katherine. He talks to himself and speaks of a mysterious "they" that apparently he feels is watching him. Katherine tries her best to get him to tell her what's going on and what she can do to help but he pushes her away with more of his words that make no sense to her. After a particularly bad night, Katherine gets up the next morning to find James has gone. The only thing he has taken with him is his journal.

When A VIEW FROM THE LAKE begins, James has been missing for a year and Katherine has agreed to sell the resort to a property developer so that she can start over somewhere else. On this day, a snow shower has begun with flakes gently falling to the ground and she remembers a visit to her old college friend, Carlo. At the end of that visit, Carlo had offered to look into James' disappearance. Katherine doesn't feel it will do any good but Carlo wants something occupy his free time so he does it anyway.

Along the road to discovering some very disturbing things in James' background, Carlo witnesses some intensely horrific events. He becomes convinced that Katherine is in grave danger and is on his way to save her through what has become a raging snow blizzard. He's not sure what he's found out but he's sure it's bad.

Alone at her house, Katherine has begun seeing and hearing some very strange things. As darkness approaches, she sits huddle on the floor of her living room with her cat and a shotgun that's pointed toward the sliding glass doors. Will she make it through the night?

A VIEW FROM THE LAKE is a very captivating, blood chilling tale. I simply could not put it down. It draws you in from the first page and doesn't let you go---- ever. Not even after I read the last page could I stop thinking about it. There was only one problem with this book that I could find and that's in leaving too many unanswered questions at the end. You won't find a tidy ending here. Instead, you find several questions that you still need to figure out. It's quite possible that the answers were hidden in some of the prose like writing that Mr. Gifune delivers and, in that case, it's my own fault that the questions weren't answered for me. At any rate, if you enjoy a good horror story that's different from the rest, treat yourself to A VIEW FROM THE LAKE. It's the "thinking man's" horror story.