“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 … 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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I thought it was just okay. It had great elements but I just feel like warm about the whole book
I just had to keep reading to find out what happened. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The characters were so well crafted, even though some were not as nice as others! Am definitely going to read more from this author.
The Nanny slowly reals you in and never lets you go !!
Hannah, the Nanny is evil, somewhat of a sociopath and just down right crazy !!
Jocelyn after many years returns to her home where she grew up with her daughter Ruby to stay with her Mum as she gets on her feet.
The Nanny is a bit gothic, murder, mystery and a dysfunctional family in a small town. What could be better?
Clear you schedule and settle in for a great read !!
I really enjoyed this audio book. The narrator did a fine job of keeping my interest. The story as a whole was a very good story, but I was hoping for a different ending to this. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the heck out of it, but I was hoping for something else.
I recommend this book and hope that you pick it up and give it a try.
This book kept me awake after reading it! It made me look at the concept of a nanny as horrifying!
Gilly MacMillan ups the gothic horror ante to a new level.
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.
With its buried secrets, shifting allegiances, and creeping sense of dread, The Nanny pulses with tension until its shocking conclusion. I absolutely loved it!
The Nanny by Gilly Macmillan is a great psychological suspense read!!
I read the synopsis a while back and was instantly hooked. I’m a sucker for an British story of the upper classes, their ‘help’ and all the secrets and scandals. I’m here for all of it!
The story hooks you by like chapter one and leaves you constantly wanting more.
It wasn’t a heart pounding thriller (I just finished The Last Widow which was a THRILL RIDE). I would definitely dub it a slow burn read.
Macmillan’s writing style is character based and focuses more on their journeys than mouth dropping twist and turns. I remember thinking that when I read ‘The Perfect Girl’.
The characters are flawed- class divides, power plays, secrets and a somewhat coldness reigns supreme in all of them.
The main character did get on my nerves a bit. She is so MEAN to her mother. Everything is explained by the end, but like gahhh she really hates the woman.
Towards the end of the book, I wanted to slap her, shake her violently and yell WAKE UP AND SMELL THE MANIPULATION!
While it doesn’t shock you or completely wreck your mind, it leaves you feeling satisfied and has almost like a ‘happily ever after’ end.
Short review: a great British psychological suspense book!
Jocelyn begrudgingly returns home to her posh family estate in England with her young daughter Ruby in tow after the accidental death of her husband. After spending so many years trying to avoid contact with her estranged mother, Jo now finds herself dependent on the family wealth she has come to resent. The only fond memory Jo has from childhood is of her nanny, who unexpectedly disappeared one night due to what she was led to believe were her own faults and misbehaviors. Secrets of an aristocratic family, resentments built on faulty memories, the grisly discovery of a body threatening the family’s reputation- these tropes have become very familiar to today’s reader of mystery fiction. The Nanny, a new novel by Gilly Macmillan, begins with a well-worn premise but remarkably rises above other suspense thrillers that have already wandered down this path. Jo’s mother, Lady Virginia Holt, is not the frosty self-absorbed stereotype that she first appears. Jocelyn is not the likeable but hapless victim of a neglectful upbringing, and the body in the lake at Lake House may not be that of the missing nanny, after all. The story depicts the high moral price that is exacted in order to maintain a status that is hopelessly outdated and even despised by contemporary society. Even Jo and Ruby find themselves drawn into lies that may break their precious bond as they blindly struggle to protect each other. MacMillan’s book addresses both the debasement of those attempting to forcibly attain access to a life of privilege and wealth, and the rigidity and false glamour that makes their covetousness undeserved. With vivid characters and well-paced action, The Nanny would be most suitable for lovers of suspense looking for a familiar tale told with a refreshing style.
Thanks to the author, Edelweiss, Library Thing and William Morrow for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.
I loved reading an advance copy of this unpredictable, twisty, dark and yet literary tale. Gilly Macmillan is a force!
The Nanny was a top-notch thriller that I read in one sitting! Once I started, I couldn’t put it down!
Jo has always had trouble with her parents, particularly her mother, Virginia. Now, she has returned after thirty years with her daughter, Ruby. This is the very LAST place she wants to be, but she has no choice. There is nowhere else to go.
When she was young, Jo had a nanny, Hannah, that she just adored. In fact, she loved her much more than her own mother. However, Hannah, just disappeared one night, and Jo never got over it. She always thought her mother had something to do with it, so Jo grew up bitter and resentful. Not long after arriving home, a set of bones is located in the lake. Could it be Hannah? Before Jo can wrap her head around it, a visitor shows up and turns everything upside down.
This is not only a mystery, but it is also a look into a dysfunctional family. Not everything is as it appears to be which just adds to the mystery. More of the mystery surrounding Hannah is uncovered in each chapter which is told in three different points of views….Jo, Virginia, and the police detective investigating the discovery.
I loved the way in which the author gave readers little tidbits through flashbacks of the past. It also allowed me to discover more about the complexity of each character. Without spoiling much, my feelings about Jo and Virginia constantly changed. These women are far from perfect, but there were small things that endeared them to me.
The twists and turns continued throughout. I would think I had it figured it out, but I was proven wrong again and again. The setting was laid out perfectly. I felt like I was there at Lake Hall watching everything unfold. If you love good suspense with complex characters and an ending you won’t see coming, grab this book today!!!!!
It was pretty boring up until the end.
Didn’t see that ending at all! Really enjoyed it!
I really enjoyed this book with its buried secrets and intense suspense. I thought it might have a different ending than what it did. But, I still liked it.
I nearly stopped reading this book, more than once, but I’m glad I pushed on. My main problem with it was that there were simply zero likable characters. I really hated Jo. She moves back in to her childhood home though she’s estranged from her mother and then she goes about doing hiring and moving in staff that her mother made it clear were not welcome in her house. If you’re not the type that needs to like the main characters, this is a great book with lots of twists and turns. If you’re like me you’ll slog through sorta wishing they’d all just kill each other already and get it over with. I really liked the ending which is why I’m giving it 4 stars instead of 3 but I can’t tell you about that because spoilers aren’t my thing.
3.5 stars
Not as good as her previous books