Yikes, The Perfect Lie book makes Babette’s plan for her children even more disturbing

*Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Perfect Lie*

The ending of The Perfect Lie on Netflix finally exposes Babette as the culprit behind Evert’s murder, but the full extent of her plan is even more disturbing in Saskia Noort’s original novel, The Dinner Club. 

Much like the 2004 book, the new TV show centres around a house fire that tears apart a group of tight-knit friends, who all have secrets of their own. Only Evert (Edwin Jonker) dies in the fire, while his wife Babette (Noortje Herlaar) and their two children Beau (Bryson Kroonen) and Luuk (Henk Courbois) survive. 

Initially, police believe Evert was to blame. Through their investigation and forensics, they reveal to the group that their findings suggest Evert “started the fire himself” by using gasoline to stoke the blaze in various spots throughout the house. And they also reveal that the family had been drugged with benzodiazepines to sedate them.

The motive, they believe – which is supported by claims from Babette – is that she was going to divorce him, and so he lashed out and decided they should all die together. But we later find out that this isn’t true. 

In fact, Evert was going to leave Babette, and so she was the one who drugged them and started the fire. The problem with her plan is that Beau doesn’t drink his drugged milk, and so when the blaze kicks off, he gets up and finds his mum downstairs crying over an unconscious Evert. 

Beau manages to retrieve his dad’s phone in secret before the emergency services arrive, which contains the recording that proves Babette is the real culprit. Using this, Babette is finally arrested for the murder. 

While much of this is pulled straight from Noort’s novel, there’s unsurprisingly a lot more detail about Babette’s lies in the source material. 

Babette’s plan for the children is even darker in the book

While both versions of the story see Babette drugging her family before starting the fire, The Dinner Club goes into much more disturbing detail about what actually happens to her children that night.

In Babette’s version of events, Beau wakes up during the fire and is able to make his way downstairs, but Luuk isn’t so lucky. He’s so heavily sedated that Babette initially believes he’s dead.

“I thought Luuk was dead,” she tells her friends afterwards, before describing how still he was and admitting, “I couldn’t wake him. I even hit him.” In hindsight, this is so much worse given this is what she’d done to her own children. 

The really sinister part though is what Babette allows her children to believe happened to them.

Unlike the show, police discover an apparent suicide note in Evert’s car. It’s confirmed to be in his handwriting and talks about doing whatever it takes to keep his family together, “whatever the cost”, before telling Babette he loves her and asking for forgiveness. Oddly enough, part of the paper had been torn away.

Given what we later discover, the implication is pretty damn clear: Babette used the note to help frame his death as a murder-suicide, seemingly removing whatever part didn’t fit the story she needed police to believe.

Combined with the drugs and the fire, the note helps create a convincing story: Evert had sedated his wife and children and attempted to kill all of them before dying himself.

The book explicitly says Beau and Luuk will have to live with people knowing their father supposedly “had tried to murder his own wife and children”. Except their father hadn’t tried to murder them at all.

And then Babette lets everyone believe she saved them

While it’s clear Hanneke (Rifka Lodeizen) isn’t trusting of Babette’s grieving widow act in The Perfect Lie, the book makes her lies even worse by portraying herself as the heroic mum who risked her own life to save Beau and Luuk from the danger she created.

After the fire, she tells her friends she only woke up because she fell out of bed, despite supposedly being woozy from the sleeping pills. She claims she carried Beau downstairs as the fire spread through the kitchen, left him safely outside and then ran back into the burning house to find Luuk.

And everyone completely buys it. After Babette describes being forced to jump from a window with an unconscious Luuk in her arms, one of her friends tells her, “You saved your children. You fought for their lives.”

Rather than correcting them, she repeatedly tells the story of how she saved her sons and even starts making Evert’t alleged plan sound more calculated.

At one point, she declares, “I should have been dead. And my boys.” She then claims Evert deliberately planned to survive the fire himself so he could start a new life with Hanneke, while Babette, Beau and Luuk were simply “ballast” he needed to get rid of.

For a long time, her story works. It becomes so accepted that even Evert’s funeral notice describes his death as an incomprehensible “act of desperation”, while promising Babette, Beau and Luuk that their friends will always be there for them.

It’s pretty chilling when you know the person everyone is praising for saving Beau and Luuk is actually the person who tried to kill them in the first place. 

Babette’s affair with Simon makes her motive even more twisted

But there’s another pretty major part of Babette’s motive that The Perfect Lie leaves out: in the book, she’d been having an affair with Simon.

Simon eventually admits that he and Babette slept together, but says he ended their relationship and told her she belonged with Evert. And, well, Babette didn’t exactly take the rejection too well. 

According to Simon, she became obsessive, repeatedly calling, emailing and texting him, and even sending him naked photographs. 

This context makes what Babette tells Simon immediately after the fire particularly damning. When she’s recovering in hospital following Evert’s death, she tells him, “At least now he isn’t in our way anymore.”

It’s enough to make Simon seriously suspect that Babette was responsible for the fire. And by the end of the novel, there’s really no denying how Babette sees Simon. 

She tracks him and Karen to a hotel and attacks Karen, before insisting “Simon belongs to me.” She tells him they’re the “perfect pair” and screams, “Nobody stands in the way of our happiness anymore, Simon!”

This adds a whole new layer to the story. In the book, Evert really was having an affair with Hanneke, and had planned to leave Babette to be with her. But Babette was doing the same thing with Simon – one rule for Evert, another for herself. 

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Featured image credit: Netflix