Who pushed Hanneke in Netflix’s The Perfect Lie? The book actually gives us the answer

*Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Perfect Lie*

The Perfect Lie is the perfect binge-worthy new show on Netflix, and while the central mystery gets solved by the end, there’s a final twist right at the last minute about who pushed Hanneke. 

The seven-episode series is a Dutch thriller following a tight-knit group of friends whose dark secrets bubble to the surface after one of them dies in a house fire. It’s got everything you could want: deaths, murder, affairs, drug scandals – the lot. 

In the very first episode, we see the group standing outside the home of their friends, married couple Babette (Noortje Herlaar) and Evert (Edwin Jonker), whose house has gone up in flames. 

Thankfully, their two children are okay, but Babette is fighting for her life and Evert is dead. And a toxicology report reveals they had been drugged.

The Perfect Lie then jumps between different timelines, with new twists and revelations piecing the puzzle together. Initially, all signs seemingly point to Evert being the culprit, the theory being that Babette was going to leave and take the children from him. 

Who started the fire?

But as we finally find out in the season finale, it was Babette all along. She had discovered Evert was planning to leave her and, rather than let her seemingly perfect family fall apart, decided that none of them would survive without it. 

She crushed sleeping pills into the children’s milk and drugged Evert’s tea, intending to sedate her husband and children before setting the house on fire.

But her plan didn’t go quite as expected. Her son Beau didn’t drink his milk, meaning he wasn’t knocked unconscious when the fire started. He woke up after smelling the smoke and tried to save his dad.

Babette, Beau and her other son Luuk ultimately survive the blaze, while Evert wasn’t so lucky. But just before the flames engulfed their home, Beau managed to secretly retrieve his dad’s phone. 

And if you remember, Evert had been secretly recording his conversations with Babette as instructed by his lawyer, meaning all the evidence proving Babette’s guilt is on his phone. 

It’s why Beau has been keeping the phone hidden from his mum. The truth finally comes out when Karen (Loes Haverkort) discovers the device and listens to the recording. 

Babette confronts her and threatens her with a knife, but the police show up right in the nick of time to arrest her.

Case closed? Well, not quite. Because earlier on in the Netflix series, as secrets about the rest of the group come to light, Hanneke (Rifka Lodeizen) gets pushed off a balcony, leaving her in a coma. 

Now, you might assume that Babette was the culprit given she was convinced Hanneke had an affair with Evert. But even when the police interrogate her, she insists she didn’t do it. 

Again, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if she’s lying. However, the very final scene throws everything into doubt. 

Karen is seen sitting and talking to Hanneke from her hospital bed when all of a sudden Hanneke’s hand twitches, suggesting she’s about to wake up. 

Karen rushes to find a doctor, and during this time, a mystery figure takes the opportunity to pay Hanneke a visit. They have a red heart balloon, but they’re wearing a hoodie, meaning we never see their face. And that’s exactly where the finale ends, so who could it be?

Who pushed Hanneke in the book?

The Perfect Lie is based on Saskia Noort’s best-selling 2004 novel The Dinner Club, and thankfully, the book gives us a much more definitive answer: Babette is the person who pushes Hanneke from the balcony.

In the novel, Hanneke doesn’t survive the fall and remain in a coma – instead, she dies. Karen refuses to believe her best friend’s death was a suicide and becomes increasingly determined to find out what really happened.

And it turns out Hanneke knew far too much. She had worked out the truth about Babette and the wider secrets of the group. Babette therefore pushes her from the balcony to stop the truth from coming out.

There’s another messy layer to all of this, too. In the book, Hanneke and Evert had been having an affair, while Babette herself had previously been involved with Simon.

Simon eventually ended their affair, but Babette remained fixated on him. So when she discovers that Karen and Simon are now sleeping together, she turns on Karen too, attacking her and attempting to kill her.

By this point, Babette’s vulnerable widow act has completely unravelled, with Karen finally discovering that she was responsible for both Evert and Hanneke’s deaths.

Now, even though the book gives us a clear answer, if you’ve watched the show, you’ll know that it makes some huge changes to the source material. 

For one, Hanneke and Evert don’t have an affair in the show, nor do Simon and Babette (as far as we can tell). And, as said, Hanneke does survive in the TV adaptation. 

In a conversation with Nu.nl, screenwriter and series creator Dorien Goertzen explained why these changes were made. “I think this is a new, perhaps more modern version of the story, in which the female roles are a bit stronger and the men come off a bit worse in a good way,” she explained. 

“I wanted to be faithful to the book this time as well. But freedom is important in an adaptation, because I can’t write what someone else has in mind. And besides, I really wanted to give it my own twist and bring it into the present day. Fortunately, we received a lot of enthusiasm from Saskia.”

Speaking of which, Noort gave her blessing in the interview, saying, “The creators took their freedom, and I think that works very well… People are reading less and less, so you have to offer stories in other ways as well. It would, of course, be nice if this made people want to discover my other books too.”

All of that being said, we still don’t know for sure who pushed Hanneke in the TV version – or if the mysterious hooded person is the real culprit. 

Will there be a season 2?

Unfortunately, Netflix hasn’t yet given the greenlight for The Perfect Lie season 2. But that cliffhanger certainly leaves the door wide open – and there’s actually plenty more source material if Netflix does decide to continue the story.

The Dinner Club isn’t a standalone novel. Saskia Noort returned to Karen and the group in 2013 with a direct sequel, Debet, which takes place roughly a decade after the events of the first book.

It follows Karen after her husband Michel is killed in a car accident and she discovers their seemingly perfect life was hiding some pretty horrifying secrets. Her search for answers ultimately takes her back to Bergen and the surviving members of the Dinner Club.

And that’s still not the end. Noort released a third book, De Nazaten, in 2023, turning The Dinner Club into a full trilogy.

Of course, the Netflix adaptation has already made some huge changes to the first novel, not least leaving Hanneke alive and turning the identity of her attacker into a cliffhanger. So there’s no guarantee a potential second season would simply adapt Debet.

But between the unresolved final scene and two entire sequel novels already sitting there, the writers certainly aren’t short of places they could take the story next.

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Featured image credit: Netflix