One morning not long after, Caroline and the maid find that Mrs Ayres has hanged herself. The day of Mrs Ayres' funeral, Faraday and Caroline set plans to marry in six weeks' time. Caroline, however, is listless and uninterested in the wedding, eventually calling it off and making plans to sell Hundreds Hall. Faraday is unable to believe it and tries several times to talk Caroline out of it, to no avail. On the night of their would-be wedding, Faraday has a call that keeps him out. When he finally comes home, he learns that Caroline hurled herself off the second floor onto a marble landing, killing herself. The maid reports at the inquest that she awoke to hear Caroline go upstairs to investigate a sound she heard in the darkened hall. She simply said "You!" then fell to her death. Three years later, Faraday continues to visit the abandoned mansion, unable to find what Caroline saw. Sara O'Leary in "The Gazette" states that Waters' narrative voice is her strongest asset and that she has an "uncanny ability to synthesize her research and is never expository in the telling details she draws upon—tiny little things about what people wore or ate or had in their houses". Emma Donoghue in "The Globe and Mail" remarks on the diversion from the narrative style in "The Little Stranger". Waters is known in her previous four novels for providing plot twists, but this one, notes Donoghue, provides a straightforward accounting that tackles issues of insanity, poltergeists, and family secrets "with a minimum of tricks". The review in "The Washington Post" concurs, using a quote by Henry James to say everything to be done in the way of ghost stories and haunted houses has been done. Ron Charles states that the novel is not cliché due to Waters' restraint: "the story's sustained ambiguity is what keeps our attention, and her perfectly calibrated tone casts an unnerving spell". A similar review appeared in "The Australian" calling attention to Waters' "moderation and flawless cadence" that forms "a story pulsing with malevolent energy" and an "atmosphere is wickedly, addictively tense". In "The Sunday Telegraph", John Preston writes that "the richness of Waters's writing ensures that the air of thickening dread is very thick indeed. Everything, from Mrs Ayres's 'absurdly over-engineered shoes', to the hairs on Caroline's legs—each one 'laden with dust, like an eye-blacked lash'—is described with a wonderfully sharp eye."