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Spoilers Beyond This Point

Characters:

• Nicole: Married to her high-school sweetheart, Tom, just won the lottery, lives in the Glass Barn
• Tom: Nicole’s husband, who she just found dead, floating in their pool
• Sasha: Lives in the Manor House next to the Glass Barn, teaches yoga
• Olly: Sasha’s partner, also lives in the Manor House, working on the next great novel
• Kitty: The housekeeper for the Manor House, lives in the Coach House on the grounds
• Anna: The owner of the Manor House
• Nick: Anna’s husband, passed away several years ago
• Hal: Lead detective on the case, very distrusting
• Jen: Secondary detective on the case, compassionate but not foolish
• Patrick: Tom’s friend since childhood
• Tom’s grandmother: Passed away last year, did not like Nicole

Summary (with Spoilers)

“Olly glances at her. He has so much admiration for Sasha. She is without a doubt the best liar he has ever known.”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

Right off the bat, Olly and Sasha are weird. The book starts in Nicole’s point of view, so we don’t know much, but what we do know is a little suspicious. They’re in their late twenties, but live on a huge estate with a housekeeper. Sasha teaches yoga classes, but Olly doesn’t seem to have any sort of job. They’re helpful with Nicole after she finds Tom’s body, and graciously allow her to stay with them as long as she needs.

Soon after the news breaks about Tom’s death, Nicole is contacted by Tom’s childhood friend, Patrick. He offers to spend a few days at the Glass Barn with Nicole so she’s not alone. She quickly accepts, and Patrick arrives the next afternoon. They both miss Tom and are his two oldest and closest relationships.

“When Sasha’s left the room, Hal says, ‘They don’t have rock solid alibis, this couple, or the housekeeper. If this is murder, I don’t think we can rule them out.’”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

Hal & Jen are quickly introduced as they begin to investigate Tom’s death. They hold their initial interviews at the Manor House, where everyone seems a little off. Unfortunately, Sasha, Olly, and Kitty are each other’s alibis, which isn’t provable. Luckily, Nicole has a very strong alibi. She’d been running errands out of town with enough evidence to bump her from the immediate suspect list.

As Hal and Jen continue their investigations, Kitty seems especially concerned. She takes great pains to let them know that Sasha and Olly could be listening to every word because of the many hidden passages in the Manor. She arranges a secret meeting with the detectives at the station, telling Sasha and Olly she’s getting her hair done.

“‘I’m not Kitty Ellis,’ she says. ‘My name isn’t Kitty. I’ve been coerced by Olly and Sasha into pretending that I’m her.’ ’Who are you, then?’ Hal asks. ‘I’m Anna Creed. The Manor House belongs to me.’”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

Throughout the book, we skip back and forth in time between present day, the day Tom died, and reading excerpts of Anna’s diary. What isn’t revealed until this moment is that we know Anna, she’s just been called Kitty. In her diary entries, Anna talks about her actual housekeeper named Kitty, who convinces Anna to get out after her husband Nick passes away. At Kitty’s recommendation, Anna goes to a yoga class. The teacher, Sasha, immediately befriends Anna and promises to help Anna battle her depression.

This eventually leads to Anna inviting Sasha and Olly to live in the Manor House with her. In her entries, she makes it seem like it was all her own idea, but from the outside, it’s easy to see Sasha and Olly’s manipulation tactics at work. Soon Sasha is teaching yoga classes in the Great Hall while Olly claims the Study for his writing.

“Patrick has been lying. About everything. He’s in debt, and a lot of it, by the sounds of things. He hasn’t changed at all. These are the sort of people she and Tom warned him against.”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

Back in the present, Patrick seems to be hiding something from Nicole. One day he takes off, leaving his phone. When it rings, Nicole answers it, and is shocked to have a man scream at her, demanding payment. She figures out that Patrick owes the caller an extremely large sum of money, and confronts him. Patrick insists that he wouldn’t ask for money from Nicole if he didn’t desperately need it, but she refuses to give him anything, and demands he leave the Glass Barn. She feels shaken up and shares what happened with Sasha, Olly, and Anna. Anna offers to spend nights at the Glass Barn so that Nicole doesn’t have to stay there alone, and Nicole is thrilled.

When Anna left the police station after revealing her identity, she also left her diary for the detectives. And as they start to read through it, one question pops up. What happened to the original Kitty? Their team determines a few pieces of information, including her last known sighting and next of kin. She hasn’t been seen since Anna’s last sighting of her, which Anna describes as a fight between Olly and Kitty. She then describes Sasha and herself cleaning Kitty’s cottage with bleach and throwing everything of hers away. Sasha says it’s because Kitty quit, but Anna sees all of Kitty’s diabetic tests left behind, and she knows Kitty needs that to survive.

“He cuts in. ‘Then we’re going to be running two murder investigations.’”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

Even though Anna’s diary entry doesn’t spell it out, Hal and Jen safely assume that Olly and Sasha killed Kitty. This theory gains even more traction when they interview her next of kin. Her sister isn’t sad to hear about Kitty’s passing, but does mention their annoying nephew, Olly. It seems like Olly’s been scheming for years, and Kitty might’ve been a part of his master plan.

While the detectives chase down leads, Anna is determined to answer a few of her own questions. Namely, where is Kitty’s body? After thinking about it for a while, she realizes that Olly once specifically asked her where on the property she would hide a dead body. And like all self-important people do, Olly had answered his own question. He would put a body where there were already human bones. 

She immediately calls Hal to tell him about the plague pit where many bodies have been buried, and he’s hesitant to believe her. He’s really been hesitant to believe anything she says, which I think is fair. Letting two other people live in your giant house while you live in the servants quarters doesn’t really give you a lot of credibility. Regardless, he sends Nicole down to the Manor House to check everything out.

“They moved Kitty’s remains to the Manor’s septic tank.”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

By this point, Sasha has stopped hiding that she’s the true mastermind between herself and Olly. While Anna is trying to convince the detectives to look for Kitty’s body, Sasha has already decided to move Kitty. She and Olly dig Kitty’s body up in the middle of the night. They move her into the brand new septic tank, which did not exist when they killed Kitty. 

Sasha is pleased with herself for coming up with a good solution and the two try to continue living like everything’s normal. Unfortunately, Patrick decides now is the time to reveal himself. Since being kicked out by Nicole, he’s casually been living in the woods between the two estates, and saw Sasha and Olly move Kitty’s remains. He approaches Olly and blackmails him, demanding £10,000. Olly tells him it’ll take time to get that much money together, and sends him on his way. 

Patrick comes back the next day and meets with Olly and Sasha. Olly tries to convince Patrick they’d pay him much more than £10,000 if he’s willing to wait 6 months. But Patrick is insistent on getting paid immediately. Olly convinces him to stay the night, then murders him within minutes while Sasha’s in the other room. Sasha is shocked, and leaves the Manor House, leaving Olly to clean up his mess.

“‘The police are at the plague pit.’ ‘What?’ His eyes look a little wild. ‘Is that where you went? Why?’ ‘Did you clean up?’ she asks. He nods. ‘He’s in the septic tank. I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if I did the right thing.’”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

On her walk, Sasha sees Jen examining the plague pit, and hurries back to Olly. He had also put Patrick in the septic tank, so they’re hopeful that everything will just blow over. Instead, they’re quickly greeted by Nicole, who has come with her team from the plague pit and has a few more questions for them. Sasha, furious with the way Olly has handled everything, immediately takes back her statement that gave Olly an alibi. Olly bolts, and tries to escape through the series of hidden passageways in the house.

‘And I thought your husband was safe because he was on the sunbed, and he clearly knew the visitor. I promise I thought it was okay to leave.’

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

As a manhunt starts, Nicole is grieving Tom’s death by swimming in the very pool he was found in. Anna is asleep inside the Glass Barn, but Nicole is drawn to the quiet of the pool. While outside, she sees a person. He introduces himself as Ben and explains that he was probably the last person to see Tom alive. Ben had been living in the wilderness surrounding the two estates and Tom had confronted him about it. It was an intense verbal altercation, and Ben fully admitted to instigating it. Unknown to Ben, Tom was already suffering from a concussion, and was starting to feel confused. 

After thinking about the interaction for a while, Ben was feeling guilty and wanted to apologize, so he went back to the Glass Barn’s backyard to find Tom. As he approached the pool, he saw Ben talking to someone else. He snuck back out the way he came, and thought that was that. He describes the man to Nicole, who immediately knows it was Olly.

“Tom starts to say, ‘Hi, Sasha,’ but doesn’t get the words out. Olly shoves him hard, in the back, and he falls forward, into the pool. His mouth fills with water.”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

Of course Olly and Sasha were the ones to kill Tom. I mean, technically, Tom’s concussion didn’t help, but there’s no way to survive a drowning. As Nicole pieces all the information together, she begs Ben to give a statement to the detectives. He refuses, saying he’d done some things in his past that would make him a less-than-reliable witness.

He leaves, and Nicole runs into the house to tell Anna everything. As Nicole shares her side of the story, Anna tells her what had been happening next door for years. And as the two women realize how much danger they’re in, things take an even more dramatic turn. Nicole realizes there’s a third person in the house, labeled by the security system. She and Anna quickly realize it’s Olly, and are left with a difficult decision. Confronting him seems dangerous, but leaving him to wander around the enormous house is even more risky. Eventually, the women decide together to lock him in the sauna while it’s on.

“Through the strip of glass in the door, Nicole can see Olly lying limply across the bench. He’s dead.”

The Manor House, Gilly Macmillan

Nicole and Anna wait several hours before checking on Olly to confirm he’s dead. Then they have to decide what to do with the body. Since it’s now the middle of the night, they sneak his body out to the car, then drive it to the nearby lake. They weigh down his body by placing rocks in his pockets, hoping it’ll look like a suicide if the body’s discovered.

When Olly disappeared, the detectives assumed he ran away. Nicole and Anna vouch for Sasha, claiming she had no idea what her boyfriend had been doing. Nicole then reveals that she’s pregnant, and graciously offers to hire Sasha as a nanny. She even gives Sasha a copy of her own credit card, telling her to buy whatever she wants with it. The three women spend lots of time together over the next year or so, with Nicole and Anna building on their friendship while Sasha minds the baby. As a thank-you for all of Sasha’s hard work, Nicole tells her to use the credit card and book herself a luxurious vacation. And Sasha does! When she arrives back at the Glass Barn, she’s promptly arrested for stealing Nicole’s credit card information. Sasha and Anna continue to live as neighbors, satisfied with the lives they’ve fought to keep.