A Perfect Couple: The ending was totally different in the book!

The bloody Nantucket wedding didn't quite play out the same way in the novel…

Did you guess who the murderer was? A Perfect Couple had Netflix subscribers running amok all weekend. And at the end of the last episode, the revelation…

Warning spoilers!

The finale does indeed give us the name of the person who killed Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy), Amelia's maid of honor, found dead on the beach on the wedding day: it is Thomas' pregnant wife, Abigail (Dakota Fanning) who murdered Tag's mistress in cold blood. She intentionally slipped one of Karen's barbiturate pills into a glass of orange juice to knock her out, then drowned her in the ocean. Her motive? Money! Abby is fascinated by the high society she likes to frequent. However, Thomas has squandered it all. The couple is in debt and is about to receive their share of the family inheritance, when the youngest, Will (Sam Nivola) will be 18 years old. Only a few more days to wait before being rich again. Except that Merritt was pregnant with Tag, which would have restarted the countdown to the inheritance: 18 more years to wait before having access to the money. Too long for Abigail. Hence the murder. But in the book by Elin Hilderbrand, from which the series is adapted, it is not Abby who is the killer. It is… no one!

The drowning is officially ruled an accident by the police, and no murderer is arrested. Greer is the only one to solve the mystery (but keeps it to herself): Abigail has discovered that Thomas has been cheating on her with the family friend – who is named Featherleigh Dale in the novel and not Isabel Nallet (Isabelle Adjani). To get revenge, she slipped a pill into his drink, to put him to sleep and prevent him from going to fool around with her husband. Except Featherleigh unknowingly gave Merritt his drink. Merritt drank it. Then the bridesmaid was left alone on the beach wandering around, remembering her affair with Tag, before accidentally cutting her foot on glass. Trying to wash her bloody foot in the water, she sees something shiny at the bottom of the ocean and realizes it's the ring Tag gave her (a bracelet in the series). She then dives to retrieve it, falls asleep and drowns. An (almost) accidental death, truly. An ending that would have been much less strong for the series too.

Other changes

It should be noted that the epilogue, at London Zoo, with Greer Winbury (Nicole Kidman) who comes to visit Amelia, also does not exist in the book, which ends with Merritt's death, told from Merritt's point of view.

It must be said that if Greer Winbury is more or less the same on screen and on paper, the scene of the revelation of the “brother” and his “past”, in the finale ofA Perfect Couple does not exist in the novel. She never says that she met her husband Tag (Liev Schreiber) while she was a high-class prostitute. Her brother, Broderick Graham (Tommy Flanagan), doesn't exist here either. This sequence, which helps humanize the icy matriarch by showing where she comes from – and why she wants to reconnect with Amelia at the end – is not in the novel at all.