The Nanny: A Novel
“The Nanny kept me in white-knuckled suspense until the very last page. Gilly Macmillan’s breakout thriller is a dark and twisted version of Downton Abbey gone very, very wrong.” — Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author
The New York Times bestselling author of What She Knew conjures a dark and unpredictable tale of family secrets that explores the lengths people will go to hurt one another.
When her beloved nanny, Hannah, left without a trace in the summer of 1988, seven-year-old Jocelyn Holt was devastated. Haunted by the loss, Jo grew up bitter and distant, and eventually left her parents and Lake Hall, their faded aristocratic home, behind.
Thirty years later, Jo returns to the house and is forced to confront her troubled relationship with her mother. But when human remains are accidentally uncovered in a lake on the estate, Jo begins to question everything she thought she knew.
Then an unexpected visitor knocks on the door and Jo’s world is destroyed again. Desperate to piece together the gaping holes in her memory, Jo must uncover who her nanny really was, why she left, and if she can trust her own mother…
In this compulsively readable tale of secrets, lies, and deception, Gilly Macmillan explores the darkest impulses and desires of the human heart. Diabolically clever, The Nanny reminds us that sometimes the truth hurts so much you’d rather hear the lie.
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Community Reviews
Jo returns home broken following the sudden death of her husband, Chris. She must put the interests of their five-year-old daughter, Ruby, ahead of all else. While Chris's business affairs are sorted out, she plans to stay with her mother, a "seventy-year-old relic of the English aristocracy, cold, old-fashioned, snobbish, selfish, greed, and fluent in the Queen's English." Jo's father is deceased and she hasn't see her mother in a decade. From Jo's perspective, her mother bullied her throughout her childhood to the point that she found it necessary to "put an ocean between" herself and her childhood. To her horror, she sees a relationship between Ruby and her "Granny" instantly forming and she is powerless to prevent it because her grief over the loss of her husband is "so intense it feels as if I'm bleeding out." She wonders how she can possibly mother Ruby and worries that her mother will take her place in her child's life.
Against that backdrop, as Jo and Ruby explore the shore of the island situated in the middle of the lake, Ruby discovers a human skull with fracture lines across the dome. The authorities begin investigating, using DNA and other techniques to ascertain the decedent's age and identity. Could it be Hannah's remains? After all, she was never heard from again after she suddenly left the Holts' employ.
MacMillan relates the story through alternating first-person narratives from Jo and her mother, Virginia. The discovery of the human remains sends both women into an emotional frenzy. For Jo, it brings "a strange, creeping sense of inevitability" as she posits whether it could explain what happened to Hannah. But for Virginia, the ongoing police investigation threatens the revelation of secrets that she has kept for many years. As the story progresses, MacMillan makes clear that nothing the police learn is going to come as a surprise to Virginia, and there are even more things about her character and her past that are deeply troubling.
The only guileless character is little Ruby, a typical little girl thrust into the grief of losing a parent and the upheaval that followed it. She must start a new school, attempt to make new friends, and adjust to living in the ancestral home of a grandfather she will never now while getting acquainted with a grandmother she has never met before. Her new life is nothing at all like the one she left behind in California.
Jo is in the midst of a personal crisis as a result of losing her husband, financial security, and the home she built with him far away from the disturbing memories of her childhood. Jo grew up believing that her mother was the source of all of he problems. She adored he father, but felt that they "lived with our hands stretched out toward each other but were never able to touch. Mother got in our way." In her grief and desperation, Jo is gullible. Her naivete might prove to be her downfall. In fact, it could prove to be deadly. MacMillan ratchets up the dramatic tension as Jo makes one bad decision after another.
And MacMillan injects a third-person narrative, detailing the activities of another woman. Linda Taylor escaped a brutal, abusive childhood and reinvented herself many years ago. How does she figure into the mystery unfolding in the Holt family?
Through a cleverly-plotted mystery, MacMillan illustrates how Jo's long-held assumptions have informed her own decision-making. But she was not the only member of the Holt family who misunderstood what was happening right before her eyes, the import of those events, or the long-lasting consequences thereof. Each of the three women at the center of the tale is flawed in significant ways. Those flaws not only compel the action forward at an unrelenting pace. They also make those characters intriguing and keep readers guessing about their moral ambiguities right up to the shocking conclusion.
At the heart of MacMillan's family drama is a surprisingly touching examination of the mother-daughter relationship. In MacMillan's capable hands, neither Jo nor Virginia is fully good or evil. Rather, both are victims not only of their own choices, but of jealousy, misperceptions, assumptions, manipulations, and betrayals that MacMillan reveals at defty-timed junctures, the cumulative total of which has led them to their current crisis. Can the villainous plans put into motion be discovered and derailed in time to save Jo and Virginia, as well as innocent Ruby? Leave it to MacMillan to deliver a jaw-dropping ending that raises as many questions as it answers.
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