A House Built on Lies

A House Built on Lies really is a different kind of thriller than we're used to getting from LMN, because while it seems to be a tawdry murder mystery with a lot twists and turns to the plot, in the end the whole story is really informed by the childhood trauma experienced by Daisy and Louise, and the 'murder' wasn't really a murder. Louise did not go to Chris that night with the intention to kill him, and she only pushed him because he grabbed her, but she did not intend for him to go out the window. But did that moment cause her to snap? Or was it a combination of that and Daisy's health issues that caused her to take over the mothering duties to the point that she was worried something would happen to Daisy and James would end up in the system? Perhaps if Daisy had told Louise sooner that she was the designated guardian, she wouldn't have been so overly protective. There really is a lot of ambiguity to the situation, a lot of 'what ifs' to be considered, but in the end I don't think Louise was intended to be a bad person, she just had a lot of trauma that had never been addressed. Perhaps Emily should have also reached out to her to make amends, but most of her ire had been directed at Daisy so she had to reach out to her first (although she knew the women were inseparable). I like that the story did not end with Daisy accidentally killing Louise -- since they ended their showdown in the room where Chris died, I was sure Louise would somehow end up going through the window in the end. Instead, Daisy could empathize with Louise's pain -- their shared pain -- and embraced her tightly, becoming a comfort even though she was still reeling from the facts surrounding Chris' death and her own drugging. I wish there had been something in the coda of the story to tell us what charges Louise was going to face, and I wonder if Daisy would ever be able to forgive her. I am happy that she found an ally in Zack, and that he didn't hold her accusations of murder against her....