The Housemaid by Frieda McFadden

 The Housemaid

Author: Frieda McFadden

Genre: Thriller, Suspense, Drama

Narrator: Lauryn Allman

Audible length: 9 hours 46 minutes

3.5/5

The Housemaid by Frieda McFadden is a mystery thriller book, part of three novel series started in 2022. The first book is told from a few different first person narrative, mainly from the two main female characters. Nina Winchester is a rich housewife who is well-known in the community as the wife of a famous and wealthy businessman, Andrew Winchester. She decided to employ a housemaid to take care of the household, Millie Calloway, a beautiful homeless young woman trying to rebuild her life

The book is quite enjoyable. I listened to it in about a week during the long drives that I had to do back in March. There is a lot of twists and turns, however it was quite easy to guess who the main villain character is in the story. Despite having the antagonist being quite easy to guess from about the first quarter of the book, it did not diminish the fact that The Housemaid is an interesting story that is engaging but still easy to consume. Frieda McFadden used a lot of everyday language that are easy to understand, which as a second language speaker in English, made The Housemaid easy to follow.

The first person narrations were pretty consistent throughout The Housemaid. It brings out the characteristics of Nina Winchester and Millie Calloway in a clear manner, making the story feels more personal. However, there were a few plot points that I think The Housemaid could have dug deeper into. One example would be the antagonist's backstory and motive, which seems to be a bit thin and could have been intertwined in the story more; maybe even giving that antagonist a first person voice. There are also some things that are just illogical, like the language barrier that exists even when Millie Calloway is armed with a smartphone (I think it was an iPhone) which is most definitely loaded with Google Translate, or the ability to surf the web and the internet to go to the web version of Google Translate.

All in all, if you want some easy reading with a lot of twists and turns that will grab your attention, Freida McFadden achieved that with The Housemaid.

Get the audiobook version on Audible or the physical version on Amazon (not sponsored)