The Housemaid’s Secret
Millie Calloway works as a housemaid in New York City, doing whatever the families that employ her need: cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, childcare. She’s very good at her job—maybe too good: as the novel opens, she’s about to get fired by her latest employer, who’s offended when the baby in the household starts calling Millie “mama.”
Millie desperately needs another job. She has no savings: any spare money has gone to pay for her part-time community college program in social work. Without a paycheck, she won’t even be able to pay her next month’s rent. So she’s thrilled when she’s offered a position working for a wealthy couple in a luxurious penthouse apartment across from Central Park.
There are odd things about this job. For one thing, she’s hired by the husband — Douglas Garrick, a high-powered corporate CEO — and is told not to open the door to the bedroom where his wife, Wendy, stays when she is ill. And Wendy seems to always be ill. Though Millie comes several days a week to clean the almost-spotless apartment and cook the complicated meals for which she gets written instructions, she still has never met Wendy.
Millie might have wondered if Wendy even exists, but she occasionally hears noises from that room: thumps, and sometimes crying. As time passes, she gets glimpses of Wendy when the door is open a crack. When she finally sees Wendy’s face, she’s shocked: it’s apparent that Wendy has been badly battered. And not just once.
Millie has some secrets of her own. For one thing, she has a criminal record. That’s why she works freelance, rather than for an agency: she can’t pass background checks. And she has something else in her background: she and her former boyfriend/partner helped women escape from abusive situations.
When Wendy appeals to her for help, Millie steps into action to get her away from Douglas.
But that’s just the start to a twisty and mesmerizing story. It’s suspenseful, and the surprises keep coming. This novel deservedly won a Goodreads Choice Award in 2023, as winner for Best Mystery & Thriller of the year. It’s second in a series, but can certainly be read as a standalone.
Freida McFadden is a practising physician specializing in brain injury. Though she never planned to be an author, she has been writing since she was a child. Inspired by the movie, “The Devil Wears Prada,” she wrote a novel based on her experiences as a medical intern, which she self-published in 2013 as The Devil Wears Scrubs, followed by several other books of medical humour. However, she soon switched to writing thrillers, because that was the genre she loved to read.
Her breakout thriller, The Housemaid, was published in 2022 by Bookouture, a UK-based digital-first publisher. The book rocketed to international bestseller status when “Booktok” reviewers on TikTok began promoting it heavily. The Housemaid’s Secret, second in the series, came out in 2023. A third in the series, The Housemaid is Watching, is scheduled to come out in June 2024.
McFadden is a prolific writer; she now has over 20 published novels, nine of them appearing in the last three years. She likes to figure out a big twist to a story before she begins writing, and describes herself as a “binge writer” rather than someone with a daily writing schedule. She often writes by dictation, presumably a mode she became familiar with as a physician.
She was born in New York City, and now lives in Boston with her husband and two teenage children.
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