Look in the Mirror (spoilers and ending explained) | Catherine Steadman

Did you just finish Look in the Mirror by Catherine Steadman and now you have a million questions? Let’s talk about it! The following review contains major spoilers for Look in the Mirror. If you are looking for a spoiler-free review, head over to the main page.

I’m so ready to talk about Catherine Steadman’s latest book, Look in the Mirror. Steadman is a master at constructing cinematic psychological thrillers, perhaps because of her background as a screen and stage actress. This time the story is set at a beautiful, state-of-the-art beachfront mansion in the British Virgin Isles and centers around two different storylines that appear to be connected by the house, though it isn’t immediately clear when these are occurring relative to one another. Nina and Maria alternate narration, and eventually some additional narrators are added (I’ll get to those shortly).

Who is Nina?

Nina is a thirty-something English professor in England who recently lost her father. Not long after he passes, she is contacted by the executor of his will informing her that her father left her a sprawling vacation home in the British Virgin Islands—a house she had no idea her father even owned. The house is stunning and state-of-the-art. Glass, marble, and high-end technology. How could her civil engineer father afford this?

James—the executor of the estate—pays for Nina to travel to meet him so he can take her to the house and get the paperwork completed. After arriving, Nina struggles to understand how her father got this house and why. She asks to see the original floor plans but James doesn’t have them. Then she learns that her father named the house Anderssen’s Opening after a famous chess move in which the player opens the game with essentially a non-move to see how their opponent will respond. It seems her father was up to something, but she hasn’t figured out what…

Who is Maria?

A medical student named Maria has taken a break from her studies to make enough money to pay for the exorbitantly-expensive program. She works as a nanny for the rich, preferring to work through an agency that sets her up on relatively short stints that pay well. She’s hoping the one she just accepted will be her last and she can go back to New York and finish school. Maria is used to eccentric clients in prior jobs she has worked. Still, it’s not long after arriving at the stunning beachfront property that she gets a weird vibe. The owner and his children never show, but the agency keeps reassuring her she’ll get paid for her full contract either way. Maria is cautioned to abide by just one rule—don’t go in the basement. This isn’t a problem (though it is a curiosity) at first because the basement is locked. But one night, the door unlocks and the room is now open. Maria peeks inside but is too afraid to go in. However, after the woman who arranged the service sends an electrician and he walks inside proving nothing bad will happen, Maria can’t help herself and she eventually enters too…

What happens to Nina once she’s at the house?

The house is state of the art, and everything including the doors and locks are fully controlled by electronic programming. Strange. In the lower-level Nina comes across a door that is electronically-locked, and James explains they haven’t been able to open it. Nina is more curious to understand what is behind the door, but James doesn’t know and he wasn’t able to access the structural plans for the house.

Nina finds warning notes around the house warning her to leave. After the first one, she goes to visit the neighbor next door and see if she knows anything about the house, but Oksana didn’t know Nina’s dad. Oksana is a bit strange, calling Nina “little red face” because of her sunburn. It’s clear Oksana didn’t know her father, but she does recall a pretty woman who was at the house about a year earlier. When Oksana tells her that there was a lot of stone taken out of the lower level of the house during construction, Nina realizes there must be a much larger basement than she realized. Her suspicions are confirmed when she goes to see Mick and his son Joe who did the contracting on the house. They mention that Nina contacted them months ago and asked them to sign an NDA for the plans to the house, and to send them to her. They now realize that was a fake Nina. Strange…

Nina and Joe connect over lunch, and a romance seems to be blossoming. At the house, Nina finds another note advising her to look in the mirror. After puzzling over that, Nina realizes there is something behind the mirror. When she shatters it, she finds a hidden camera recording her. Yikes! Nina finds more cameras and learns she has been locked into the house. She texts Joe to come over. A note carved into the wall warns her not to go in the basement, and on cue the basement automatically unlocks. Nina knows that if this was her father’s doing, she must go into the basement. It’s the chess move—Anderssen’s Opening—playing out in real life.

What happens to Maria in the basement?

After entering the basement room, Maria finds the door automatically closed behind her, locking her in. Trapped, Maria worries about dying from thirst. But when a second room opens, and Maria runs to it, she is locked in again. Six days later and Maria is starving, trapped, and worried she might die of sepsis. Eventually, Maria realizes there never was a family or a nannying job. She’s been brought her to play some sort of twisted game, and someone has been watching her the whole time. Worse, they know her real name, and Maria realizes that this game is somehow tied to her past.

Suddenly, the power shuts off (we learn this is due to Joon-gi—the electrician who was at the house the night the door opened). Maria is able to find her way out of the basement. Maria gets out of the house and is followed by several armed men. She kills them with their own tasers, and swims out into the ocean. Eventually, she makes her way to the airport and uses her savings to book a flight back to New York. Maria has escaped! For now…

How does Maria’s story end?

Maria makes it to her apartment in New York City where her roommate is out. After eating and taking a bath, a knock on the door startles her. It’s a package delivery for Freya, but when she opens the door, a man forces his way in. Maria knocks him out and uses a syringe to make sure he’s dead, then she takes his phone to confirm her own murder and hides his body. Maria heads to London to find the person who sent him. It’s the woman with the chignon who set up the fake nannying job. Her name is Lucinda. Maria cons her way into Lucinda’s house, but security has been alerted and before Maria can do anything more, they kill her and that’s the end of her story. Are you as shocked as I am???

What happens to Nina in the basement?

Nina gets locked into a series of games, each of which seems to correspond with a section of The Waste Land. The games are deadly—for instance, one game called “Death by Water” involves a room filling with water that will only stop if Nina can solve three questions. As the water gets higher, Nina must swim downwards to try to enter her answers. In another called “Burial of the Dead”, Nina is in a glass coffin filling with sand that she can only escape if she gets her heartrate below 70 bpm and keeps it there. Nina realizes that she was tricked into thinking this was her father’s house and his doing. She keeps going through the rooms, praying she can beat them all and escape.

Who is Lucinda?

Lucinda is the most fascinating character to me in many ways. Lucinda works for a mysterious organization and is responsible for recruiting participants for the “game”. The participants are all the sole living relative of someone who is about to die—someone who won’t be missed if they disappear. In a flashback we learn that Nina’s father was the inventor of the house and the game rooms. They were designed for people to play voluntarily as a parlor game. After he sold the house, the new owner began to use it for a different purpose—to allow high paying customers to observe someone else playing the game and dying when they can’t escape.

Before his death, Lucinda visited Nina’s father pretending to be a fan of his book. Her real intent was to take some personal items from the home that might convince Nina of its authenticity as belonging to her father. Lucinda is charmed by John (Nina’s father), and she feels sad about what is going to happen. He’s sharper than he seems, because without directly saying it, Lucinda can tell he suspects why she is there and the danger his daughter may be in. As Lucinda is leaving, he slips a piece of paper into her hand with a phone number on it.

How does Nina escape?

To answer this, we need to revisit a few characters. Remember that contractor Joe got a text from Nina to come to the house? Joe goes to the house where he meets Lucinda and is knocked out. He wakes up in the guard house. The person leaving Nina warning notes is Joon-gi, the electrician who shut the power off allowing Maria to escape. After he shut off the power, security caught him and blackmailed him to accept a job working for them. They tell him the people playing are wealthy and want to experience a high-stakes escape room. That used to be true, but it isn’t anymore. Later, Joon-gi is upset with himself for believing it.

“He […] wonders how he could’ve possibly not known all along that something bad is happening here […] But perhaps his biggest crime is that he assumed the world was one way and it is not.”

While Nina is stuck in the basement trying to go through the rooms, Lucinda and a guard are sitting with a confused Joe telling him that the Nina he met was a con artist. They’ll let him go even though he violated the NDA from the real Nina. Just as Joe is kicking himself for falling for Nina’s act, Lucinda signals to him that the guard is lying. Joe understands and takes out the guard. Lucinda asks Joon-gi to help her shut off the electricity to the house so they can save Nina. She calls the phone number from Nina’s father and authorities are on their way.

Nina is in a room full of burning ash and she has to find a key inside of it. Outside, Joon-gi manages to shut the generator down before he is shot by security for the game. Lucinda is indoors and copying everything she can onto a flash drive before security arrives. Nina is disoriented in the basement when the power goes out, and she tries fleeing through the darkness. She encounters a figure and stabs him, before realizing it is Joe.

How does it end?

Lucinda died that night, but the data she put onto the flash drives helps convict people profiting off of the games in this house as well as several other houses around the world. Wealthy people were paying to watch the game and ultimately the participant’s death, and they were convicted. Two years later, Nina is in witness protection. She’s in a coffee shop hoping to meet up with someone from her past and thank them. We’re led to believe it is Joe, but its’ actually Joon-gi (who survived!). Nina and Joe have been living together in witness protection since they were rescued. Nina reflects on her father and how much he taught her. She admits she never cared more about her existence until that game.

In the final scene, it’s revealed that Oksana (the woman who lived nextdoor to the house) is in charge of it all and that the operation hasn’t shut down. She’s happy for Nina for beating it, but there will always be buyers for the chance to watch a new game.

What did I think?

This book is a mash up of a few of my favorite parts of prior books: a dark, secret organization, a lonely, isolated woman up against the odds, and a twisted game. Catherine Steadman knows how to write a book! One of the biggest puzzles at the beginning is which storyline happens first. I actually felt sure that Nina was first and perhaps she would have taken over running the game from her father, but it turned out that Maria was first and actually died right before Lucinda got assigned Nina and went to visit her father.

Were we all shocked when Maria died?

I was floored when Maria was killed off! Bold move by Catherine Steadman to build such an incredible first-person narrative and really gut punch us when it ended suddenly in death. Maria was such a memorable character, and she’s hard to dislike. At the time she died (about 60%), I was obsessed with her story—her survival instinct is a driving force that helps her through the games. I understood why she wanted to go find Lucinda and figure out why she was put in the situation she was, but at the same time I was yelling at her to call it quits after the man tracked her to her apartment. It’s understandable, they would have eventually found out and come after her. She needed to disappear, but Maria is quite honestly too scrappy and confident for that. It wouldn’t be in character for her to run—she’s a survivor (and she almost managed to this time, but the organization was too large). Maria charged over to the U.K. guns blazing, and she almost accomplished what she wanted to. I kept imagining what might have happened if security didn’t show up. We know Maria can kill—we saw her do it. We also know that Lucinda had some humanity that could be tapped into. Could they have teamed up to take it down? Could they have saved Nina before she had to go through it?

Was Lucinda good or bad?

The answer is probably both? She certainly contributed knowingly to a lot of evil. At the same time, she’s the person who ultimately saved Nina, Joe, Joon-gi, and others who may have been brought to the house of horrors in the future. She gave her life turning everything over that she could. There’s a message through the book about the great impact that can come from seemingly small kindness. For Lucinda, two events back to back led her to ultimately change course and do the right thing. The first was Maria escaping, getting one over on the contract killer, and coming to her house. Lucinda later says that it was the first time she truly felt the humanity of the people brought into the game. Before, they were people on a screen. People who she met and warned not to go into the basement. It’s human nature to be curious, but technically they had a choice. Lucinda also admits that it’s not really a choice when they don’t understand that they are already in a game.

The second event that turned Lucinda was her interaction with Nina’s father. It’s clear that his kindness and warmth made an impact on her. She left knowing he realized what might be going on, and he played his final hand—win her over and leave her with the tools to do the right thing. Later, Lucinda saves Nina and others, letting herself take the fall in order to bring down the organization (well…she tried). I think the message I got from Steadman’s portrayal of Lucinda was that everyone is redeemable, no matter how lost. It didn’t erase what Lucinda had done, but it also showed that there is always time to choose to be a better person.

Was Nina’s father partially to blame?

Honestly, I debated how much responsibility should go on Nina’s father. Early in the book, its alleged that he had a secret life that he kept from Nina. And to be quite honest, he did have a secret life—the house was his brain child all along, despite some mid-book red herrings suggesting that the entire thing was a set up. He designed it as a parlor game with stakes. The question I’m struggling with was to what extent he knew how it was being used. In the scene where Lucinda meets him, it was evident that he had a fairly good idea of what might be going on with the house and that Lucinda planned to recruit his daughter into the people trafficking scheme. He doesn’t intervene, though, other than giving the phone number to Lucinda. Was that his way of testing Lucinda? What if she never called?

Reflecting on the book and what we knew about him from Nina, I suspect that a part of him wanted to let Nina go through the test. It’s never explicitly stated that he knew what the game had turned into, but it’s strongly hinted by him when he asks Nina to keep an eye on his daughter if they cross paths. As she leaves, he presses a phone number into her hands. The phone number went to the authorities and Lucinda ended up calling them to intervene in the people trafficking ring and deadly game inside the house. Even more telling, Nina herself feels as though the game—though horrible—pushed her more than she ever had been. She felt more alive, she valued her existence, and she saw her true potential. These are all things she felt insecure about her entire life. Was this a gift from her father to her? Nina certainly took it that way. Twisted!

Final Thoughts

This was a gripping book and one that kept my mind engaged. The multiple narrators were effective. I loved that Steadman was unafraid to kill off one of the leads in a sudden and spectacular way. She was right on the precipice of getting answers and then it was lights out! Cut throat. The final scene reveals that the trafficking ring isn’t gone at all, only some parts of it were exposed. The entire operation went much higher up and was led by none other than Oksana, the neighbor. I wish we got to see a bit more of Oksana during the book—she is serious deranged! But what a delicious little note to end on, right?

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