The Club

Jess

Jess does her job, her mind occasionally wandering to Jackson dying in his room. “Even now,” she could change her mind and call an ambulance, but she doesn’t. She’s kept busy with the often inane or excessive requests of Island Home’s guests. While she thinks that she should regret her actions, she doesn’t. Jackson and Georgia once did the same thing to her.

Annie

Annie mingles with the guests and considers how her life and social circle will change once she’s no longer a powerful part of Home Group. Spying Keith talking to a group of young women, she asks an employee to keep an eye on him and let her know if he takes anyone back to his room.

She remembers Keith’s journey to success, connected to Ned Groom and Home from the beginning. She doesn’t know the amount that Ned demanded from Keith but assumes that it’s perfectly calculated to be just feasible. While Ned’s blackmail may have been about funding Home in the beginning, now it’s as much a matter of controlling and toying with people.

Across the room, Ned sneers at her, and she realizes that there’s only one thing she can do: Kill Ned.

Nikki

Nikki is deeply troubled after her discoveries. She walks out in the middle of a conversation to hide in the bathroom. Lily McAlister comes into the room, a celebrity who started her modeling career around the same time as Nikki and generally beat her out for jobs. Lily treats Nikki with disdain, but Nikki doesn’t envy her celebrity or the creeps who accompany it. She’s always felt lucky to be a part of Home’s “family”—particularly in comparison to her biological family.

Nikki asks Lily for some cocaine. She wants the courage to confront Ned and is also going through an existential crisis upon the discovery that her “whole adult life has been built around an elaborate practical joke” (155). As will emerge, Ned not only knew about Ron’s statutory rape but also set Nikki up to attract the predator.

Adam

Adam goes to Ned’s private cottage, an architectural showpiece completely at odds with the humble home that he and Ned once visited when scouting the place. The biggest draw for Ned had been the huge bunker built when the island was leased to the Ministry of Defense for decades.

Adam now goes through the concealed entrance to the bunker. Ned uses it for Island’s “Home Cinema,” a feature of all Home clubs. From these spy dens, Ned can access videos of guest rooms around the world, storing sensitive information and videos for blackmail. The sleek recording setup is a far cry from the primitive microphones used in the beginning. Adam searches for the videos that Ned has of him.

An interview with Home’s security reinforces the fact that they were tasked with keeping people off of the island rather than policing the guests. Regarding the search for Ned, the man reflects that Ned never crossed the well-patrolled perimeter and wasn’t found anywhere on the island. He simply vanished.

Adam

Having failed to find the incriminating recordings the night before, Adam meets Nikki for breakfast. She tells him that Ned isn’t coming. He sent her a text saying that he was going to London. Adam assumes that it’s one of Ned’s many power plays. Mentally cursing himself, he reflects on previous instances during which Ned betrayed someone who thought they were safe. Adam doesn’t care about videos from before his marriage, but, despite his guilt, he has continued the “habit” of frequent, casual sex, never imagining that Ned would store material of his own brother.

While Adam had always been uncomfortable with the blackmail scheme, he found it easy to justify it on the basis that they were making people pay for their misdeeds. After all, Jackson Crane had killed two people.

Jess

Jess checks on Georgia Crane’s cabin, which is the farthest from her husband’s. She hides empty bottles of pills and the mortar and pestle to frame the actress for Jackson’s murder as punishment for Georgia’s (perceived) role in the hit-and-run. While Jess’s father was killed instantly, her mother lingered in a coma for 17 years. Meanwhile, the celebrities were living their glamorous lives.

The police closed the case due to a lack of evidence or witnesses. They discounted Jess’s own testimony as the feverish imaginings of a child. She told them that Captain Aquatic killed her father, recognizing Jackson from one of his film roles.

Annie

Annie goes on a group horseback ride and pulls Freddie and Keith aside. She knows what they saw in the videos. She also knows that Freddie can’t pay the fees, which is why Ned chose him. Ned wanted to demonstrate that he would use the footage. Compared to the other victims, Freddie’s footage is tame but enough to end his career. Freddie mocks his guests behind their backs and sells stories about his “actual friends” to a tabloid journalist. In fact, he sold the story about Kyra Highway’s affair, which ruined her life years ago.

Freddie is sad, but Keith mocks Annie, who denies that she enjoys her part in the scheme. She confesses that she has her own “dilemma” and proposes that the two kill Ned Groom that night. She will tell them how to get away with it.

Nikki

The novel relates more of Nikki’s backstory, fulfilling the hints of previous chapters. As a struggling 15-year-old model experiencing homelessness, she takes a job as a coat-check girl at Home’s original London location, lying about her age. She enjoys interacting with celebrity members. Ron Cox chats with her, charming her and treating her to dinner at the club. They talk late into the night, and he comes back to join her for several drinks the next night. Six months later, he returns, and they begin their “affair.” He informs her that he has an open marriage (though discretion is required), and she loses her virginity to him. They often hang out in his suite and have sex. Nikki worries that both he and her boss Ned would be angry if they ever discovered that she’s underage (which, of course, they know).

Home launch weekends always include a spectacular performance, and Annie Sparks enlisted the immersive theater troupe Coup de Théâtre to devise a show for Island Home. The performers spent months creating a piece that moves about the island and explores some of its history. Due to the celebrity guests, each attendee was provided with a hooded cloak and a comedy or tragedy mask, making them indistinguishable from one another.

Annie

Anne has persuaded Freddie and Keith to kill Ned. Her own willingness to murder the man is further fueled as she remembers all the slights over the years. She lays out the plan, which relies on the universal masking and camera-free public spaces. Annie will hand Ned a spiked drink, and the men will pull him aside during the performance and kill him.

Annie assumes that Keith has the supplies to drug Ned. Ned’s blackmail footage of Keith shows him drugging women in his rooms, stripping them while they are unconscious, and posing them for photographs. Keith then puts their clothes back on and leaves them with a note, cash for a cab, and no knowledge of his crime. These photographs become part of his art.

Nikki

Nikki’s backstory continues. She doesn’t realize that she is pregnant until shortly after her 16th birthday, six months after conception when it is too late to abort. She was on the pill, but she threw up the birth control after drinking too much. Ned finds her sobbing in a storeroom and comforts her as she confides in him. Among other problems, the baby will end her modeling career, and she doesn’t have the qualifications for many other jobs. She doesn’t tell him that Ron is the father (though Ned knows) but does confess her real age.

Ned insists that he will take care of her. He promotes her to an administrative position and takes her to Manhattan to help launch its new Home club. Nikki decides not to keep the baby, and Ned arranges a closed adoption. She briefly holds her baby, noticing the birthmarks on his calf and shoulder, before giving him up so that he can have a better life.

Adam

Adam rushes around, trying to handle matters in Ned’s absence but lacking the necessary authority and conviction. He’s mistaken for Ned more than once, which insults him. Needing some time alone, he goes to one of the screening rooms, currently playing Captain Aquatic as part of a Jackson Crane marathon. Georgia is there, and Adam wonders how much Georgia understood about Jackson when she agreed to marry him. She was young and perhaps unaware of the relentless public scrutiny that would be part of her life.

Adam remembers the night, less than two years after the Cranes’ wedding, when Ned fielded a call from Jackson. Adam listens in on speakerphone as they watch the footage from Jackson’s room. Jackson narrates the hit-and-run incident, displaying no concern for anyone else and occasionally snapping at the woman in the room. Adam thinks that this is the end of the man’s career, but then he realizes that Ned is deliberately walking Jackson through the story in order to get it on camera for future blackmail material. That moment was a turning point for Adam, the point at which he could no longer deny how sordid the surveillance and blackmail is or how deeply he is entangled. At the end of the call, Ned talks to the woman (later identified as Annie) and walks her through the necessary coverup.

Jess

The weekend has confirmed that Georgia and Jackson have an unusual and distant relationship, which Jess thinks will support the idea that Georgia killed her husband. Jess goes back to check on Jackson who is inert on the bed, a pillow over his face, and (mistakenly) concludes that he is dead. Remembering the memory stick that she found, she plugs it into a TV and watches the footage of the night that Jackson killed her father and put her mother in a coma. This is the proof that she always needed.

As a child, Jess insisted that Captain Aquatic had been driving the car, and when she saw pictures of him with Georgia, she (mistakenly) identified Georgia as the woman in the car. She persisted in this conviction, even as everyone contradicted and silenced her. In secondary school, she finally stopped telling people about the Cranes but fantasized about their karmic comeuppance. Instead, she dealt with constant media reminders of their successes. Though tempted to go to the press or post something online, she realized that no one would believe her. She could have even found herself sued. Now, she has evidence.