Readers Guide for the Ghostwriter

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As a father, Vince had his playful and fun side. He loved to devise puzzles and scavenger hunts for Olivia, but at other times was hands-off and distant, sending her to boarding school and not showing up for important events.

Olivia begins to go over her father’s notes, which are confusing and rambling. She wonders if his memories are even accurate, but her contract forbids her from discussing her work with anyone.

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Vince on June 13, 1975 8:30 pm: he digs a hole and burns a bloody shirt.

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Olivia runs into Jack, a close friend from childhood, and explains that she is visiting her father.

Vince wakes up, rambling about a knife that he can’t find.

Her publisher isn’t happy with the chapters written by her father. Olivia asks her father if she can conduct interviews, but he is adamant that she has to keep the project secret.

Vince insists that he saw his brother Danny burying their next door neighbor’s cat

Vince on June 13 1975 11:30 pm: He’s in a motel with his parents after Danny and Poppy’s bodies were discovered. He’s glad Danny is dead.

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Olivia goes to see the house where her father grew up with his siblings, but it’s vacant. She puts out some feelers to find out who owns it.

She has a zoom meeting with her publisher, her agent, and her father’s agent, who agree to let her make substantive changes to her father’s manuscript.

Olivia asks her father about a page on which he wrote over and over, “she shouldn’t have gone.” She thought this was about Vince’s sister Poppy, who had an encounter with a creepy guy while hitchhiking shortly before the murders.

Vince says he was talking about his girlfriend at the time, Olivia’s mother, Lydia. Vince didn’t want her to attend bonfire with Danny and Poppy without him, as he was grounded. The party was at the house of Mr. Stewart, a young teacher/track coach at their school who is their next-door neighbor.

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Vince in May 1975: he watches Lydia with Mr. Stewart, feeling intensely jealous.

Olivia and her father visit the graves of Danny, Poppy, and their parents

Vince April 1975: Lydia and Vince argue about Mr. Stewart. She throws up for the second time that day.

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Vince asks Olivia for help checking his email. In there, she finds a message from John Calder, the writer who sued Olivia.

Calder wants Vince to fire Olivia and hire him. Olivia responds, pretending to be her father and asking John how he found out about the top secret project.

Olivia worried that Vince thinks she’s her mother Lydia, and that he seemed to have been a bit obsessive about Lydia around the time of the murders.

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Vince May 1975: Vince watches Mr. Stewart drive Lydia home. She’s pale and tired and he knows she’s lying about where she was.

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Olivia has found an argument between Danny and Poppy in her father’s scribblings. But again he thinks she is her mother.

Olivia goes through some boxes her father gave her and finds Poppy’s journal

Poppy’s diary May 1975: She’s heard that Lydia just terminated a pregnancy. Poppy doesn’t think Vince knows.

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Olivia finds another diary entry that suggests something in Poppy’s home movies that Vince doesn’t want her to see. Poppy worries about Vince and Danny’s fighting and by June she says “one of them will kill the other.” She also says no one believes her about something and that “she’s lost the proof.”

Olivia looks and finds no film in the boxes. She asks her father and he says that maybe Poppy threw her movies away as she and Danny were fighting.

Vince mentions a treasure hunt he did for Olivia when she was eleven. She remembers being disappointed that the end of the hunt was Melinda, Vince’s assistant, instead of her father.

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Poppy’s diary May 8 1975 : She’s documents her brothers’ fighting, her mom’s drinking. Vince watches one of her reels and gets very upset, asking her to turn it off. She vows to go back and look at the March 1 reel.

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Olivia ‘s dad gives her a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the murders

• Vince’s parents returned home at 9:17 to find Poppy and Danny dead.
• Police are focusing on the man Poppy hitchhiked with, but sources say that Danny was the intended victim.

Olivia goes to the library and finds more articles:

• a ten year anniversary piece in which Poppy’s friend Margo Gibson says that she was certain Vince could have hurt Danny.
• Margo and Mark testified before a grand jury investigation into the case in 1993
• Lydia claimed she and Vince have an alibi: they were with Mr. Stewart
• In 1990, the coroner who did the Taylor autopsies lost his job over his substance abuse.

Olivia wonders: Poppy’s diaries clearly suggest she was afraid of Danny. But if Danny killed Poppy, then who killed Danny?

Matt, Jack’s husband, asks Olivia about her mother. She tells him that Lydia chose to abandon her.

Olivia learns that her father owns his childhood home.

So Olivia breaks into the house

Olivia finds a creepy message her father wrote in Poppy’s closet and calls Jack for moral support. She confesses to Jack that she’s ghostwriting a memoir.

Jack asks her how she’d proceed if she wasn’t writing about her own family, and she says she’d talk to the DA.

Olivia finds Poppy’s home movies under a loose floorboard:

• There’s a scene of her father sneaking around outside and of the infamous bonfire
• And Danny didn’t bury the cat: three a scene of Vince doing it

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Poppy’s diary May 10 1975: Poppy is filming Vince as he digs a hole in the ground. He’s burying Ricky Ricardo, Mr. Stewart’s missing cat.

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Olivia has more proof her father has been lying

She isn’t sure what to do, as she just gave the publisher a chapter describing Danny burying the cat.

She realizes that while Olivia Dumont can’t talk to witnesses, Olivia Taylor can. Olivia calls her partner Tom, who overhears Vince’s caregiver mentioning her father. She told Tom her father was dead, and he is furious that she lied.

Olivia goes to talk to Poppy’s best friend Margo Gibson, who now owns a bookstore. Margo says that tensions between Danny and Vince were escalating before the murders, and that Vince had pulled a knife on Danny.

Margo also thinks that Vince was harassing Mr. Stewart by vandalizing items at school. Also Poppy had lost her camera and said there was “proof” on it.

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Poppy’s diary May 16 1975: Lydia comes over and looks thin and pale.

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Olivia meets with Mark, one of Danny’s best friends. He says Vince and Poppy argued at the carnival on the night of the murders.

Vince suggests to Olivia that Danny was vandalizing the school, including an equipment. He describes a violent fight between him and Danny. Olivia recalls a mention of that in Poppy’s diary.

Poppy’s diary May 30 1975: Vince asks to sleep in Poppy’s room. He tells her he hates Danny and wishes Danny was dead.

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Olivia goes to speak to the DA who called the grand jury on the case back in the 90s. He tells her they were obliged to do that after the coroner was caught doing drugs. He believes that Vince’s alibi was solid.

Olivia meets with Jack, complaining that nothing her father tells her matches with Poppy’s films or diary. Jack says he does not believe Vince killed anyone.

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Poppy’s Diary June 1 1975: Vince made a treasure hunt for Poppy.

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Olivia and Vince discuss the treasure hunts he used to make for her. Many has falsehoods in them that Olivia was supposed to spot. She tells him a story about how he abandoned her in a hotel when she was in high school.

Olivia realizes that this entire project is a treasure hunt

Poppy’s diary June 3 1975: Vince made her a treasure hunt and her prize is a roll of film.

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Oliv1a shows her father a clip of him physically fighting with Danny. He tells her that was right after Danny told him about Lydia’s pregnancy termination.

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Poppy’s diary June 4, 1975: Danny bumps Vince when he’s washing a knife and he cuts himself.

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Vince says Danny suggested to him that Mr. Stewart was the father of Lydia’s baby. So Olivia goes to talk to Stewart next.

Mr. Stewart says that the night of the murders, he was meeting with Lydia and Vince, trying to mediate the situation. He adds that the baby was not his.

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Poppy’s diary June 7 1975: Poppy is trying to hitchhike to a women’s rights rally. A woman drives her there, but a creepy guy picks her up on the way back and says he’ll look for her at the carnival.

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Olivia tells her father about the email exchanges with Calder about the book. Then Olivia asks about her mother, and her father says she suffered from depression.

Olivia’s agent Nicole calls about the Calder situation and Olivia finally reveals that Vince is her father. Nicole calls this “marketing gold.” Olivia asks her to hold off on sharing the information as she needs to find Poppy’s last movie.

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Poppy’s diary June 10 1975: Poppy is running through the woods. Her brother is chasing her, trying to get her camera. It’s Danny, and he grabs the camera and throws it.

Vince June 13 1975: Poppy complains about the “lost” camera and Lydia tries to convince her to go to Mr. Stewart’s party

Poppy’s diary June 11 1975: she and Margot went to the party, and she warns Vince that Lydia needs to stay away from Mr. Stewart.

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Olivia finds a phrase in the margin of one of her father’s notepads : Danny watched her die.

She decides to compile all the margin notes

• I had to bury Ricky Ricardo quickly
• The darkest places to hide
• I wanted to kill Danny
• Danny watched her die

Olivia asks Vince if his alibi that night was a lie, and he admits he was at the house. But when he got there, it was too late.

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Vince June 13 1975: He’s at the carnival, looking for Poppy. Earlier, he’d confronted Lydia about the pregnancy. He finds Poppy, who tells him to meet her at the house. Lydia tells him she will explain everything after he meets Poppy.

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Olivia shows Vince Poppy’s diary and the clip that Vince doesn’t want Poppy to see. He punches a window and has to go to urgent care.

Olivia (finally) decides to talk to her mother

She gets right to the point: who was the father of Lydia’s baby? Then she shows Lydia the clip.

Lydia reveals that Danny sexually assaulted her, resulting in a pregnancy. Vince used the fact that Mr. Stewart drove Lydia to the clinic to get him to lie and give them an alibi for the murders.

Lydia insists that Poppy was already dead when they arrived at the house. And she has Poppy’s camera.

The Ghostwriter Ending Explained: Who Killed Danny and Poppy?

Lydia saw Poppy and Danny wresting over the camera. When Danny threw it in the woods, Lydia took it.

Lydia suggests that Danny killed Poppy. And that whatever is on that camera was the reason Danny killed Poppy. Olivia drops off the camera to have the film digitized.

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Poppy June 13 1975: Poppy is dying. Danny stabbed her. He apologies but still wants the camera. Vince arrives.

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Vince tells Olivia he wanted one last treasure hunt with her. She plays the clip of film left in Poppy’s camera.

Danny tells Mr. Stewart to leave him alone; that he must have aged out of “special time” with Stewart in the equipment shed. Stewart leaves, and Danny starts sobbing.

But then Olivia suggests that maybe Stewart killed both Danny and Poppy to keep them quiet.

Vince says he thought Danny killed Poppy to see her quiet about his assault on Lydia and her pregnancy.

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Who killed Poppy? Mr. Stewart

Poppy June 13 1975: Mr. Stewart told Poppy they needed to talk. Terrified, Poppy grabbed a kitchen knife and headed to her room Stewart overpowered her and stabbed her in the stomach. After he left, Vince arrived and he and Danny fought, with Danny knocking him into a wall.

Who Killed Danny in the Ghostwriter? Lydia

Vince June 13 1975: Vince leaves the house, injured from where Danny smashed his head against he wall. He’s trying to get to Lydia. Vince thought Danny killed Poppy and confronted him. He remembers that Danny shoved him not a wall, which must have knocked him out. When he woke up, Danny was dead.

Vince arrives at Lydia’s with the murder weapon in his hand. He isn’t really sure what happened.

Lydia tells Vince that she thought Danny had killed them both.

Vince realizes that Lydia killed Danny, both because of what she thought Danny did (killed Vince and Poppy) and (presumably) because he had sexually assaulted her.

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A year later

Olivia is being interviewed for a podcast. Her father has passed away. He still wasn’t sure if Stewart killed Poppy. He’d wanted to believe it was Danny who killed her, to justify what happened.

Before he died, Vince told Olivia he’d distanced himself from her as a young girl as she reminded him so much of Poppy.

Olivia tells the interviewer there is no physical evidence that Stewart killed Poppy or Danny. But there is evidence that Stewart was abusing students, including Danny. She keeps her mother’s secret, saying it’s hard to know what happened.

Tom and Olivia start to repair their relationship

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Vince March 3 1975: It’s Poppy’s birthday. He wonders who will move into the house next door.