The Nanny - The End (Pages 285 - end)

 RATING: OKAY

SPOILERS!!!

I finished the book and I found the end implausible and a bit over the top.

All the signs that Hannah is not good are there, but Jo is too blind to see them. Her mother tells her that Hannah lies; she locked her out of the house and she ended up wet and freezing; she hits Ruby; and Virginia thinks Hannah uses her painkillers to drug Ruby. 

Jo tells Hannah about the forgery and she starts to think she wants to be part of it. Hannah starts to suspect Hannah when Ruby tells her that she saw the nanny take Alexander's lighter. So she sneaks into the nanny's bedroom and finds the lighter. Masks are off when Jo returns to find Hannah sitting on her father's chair in his study, and the revelation shocks her. Hannah plays the tape on which she recorded a conversation between her and Alexander, agreeing to pay her to buy her silence. What happened all those years ago is that Jo discovered that Alexander and Hannah were having an affair; she saw them together and pushed her down the stairs. Alexander and Virginia gave her a pill, which eventually made her forget. They put Hannah in the shed, but she wasn't dead. So she loosened her ties and pretended to be dead when Virginia rowed her to the middle of the lake and dropped her there. Now she is back for revenge, and she is very cruel to Jo.

Then there is a strange episode in which Hannah demands they prepare a good dinner for her, and they buy all the things for that dinner. Then Hannah wants to use one of the expensive dresses which Virginia has, and they go to the bedroom. There Jo, livid and seeing red, uses a laundry bag and wraps it around Hannah's head until she is dead. Virginia and Jo move the body and drop it into the lake. 

The skull found on the lake actually belonged to Hannah's friend, Jean, who turned up one day, dirty, drunk and dishevelled, demanding she put in a good word for her. Hannah refused, and when Jean insisted, Hannah killed her and dropped her body into the lake. The police discover the identity of Jean through a reconstruction of the skull, and by looking into the woman's past, they find out that she had been friends of the Holts' nanny, and they also discover that the nanny pretended to be someone she wasn't. They go to see Virginia and Hannah, and they tell the detectives that Hannah is gone, and it isn't the first time she has upped and left. The police think Hannah killed Jean, and now that they were close to finding out the truth, she has run away.

I enjoyed the book even though it was frustrating to see how blind Jo was. I am not satisfied with the ending because I think Hannah was not a believable character for me.