Review: The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden

Name: The Housemaid’s Secret
Series: The Housemaid #2
Author: Freida McFadden
Publisher: Bookouture
Format: Kindle (through Kindle Unlimited)
Genres: Adult, Psychological Thriller, Mystery
Spice Rating: 🌶️🌶️- kisses on page & more insinuated off page

Rating:

Synopsis: Goodreads
As he continues showing me their incredible penthouse apartment, I have a terrible feeling about the woman behind closed doors. But I can’t risk losing this job – not if I want to keep my darkest secret safe . . .

It’s hard to find an employer who doesn’t ask too many questions about my past. So I thank my lucky stars that the Garricks miraculously give me a job, cleaning their stunning penthouse with views across the city and preparing fancy meals in their shiny kitchen. I can work here for a while, stay quiet until I get what I want. It’s almost perfect. But I still haven’t met Mrs Garrick, or seen inside the guest bedroom. I’m sure I hear her crying. I notice spots of blood around the neck of her white nightgowns when I’m doing laundry. And one day I can’t help but knock on the door. When it gently swings open, what I see inside changes everything…

That’s when I make a promise. After all, I’ve done this before. I can protect Mrs. Garrick while keeping my own secrets locked up safe. Douglas Garrick has done wrong. He is going to pay. It’s simply a question of how far I’m willing to go…

Review:

The Housemaid’s Secret is the sequel to Freida McFadden’s wildly popular The Housemaid. They are connected but there isn’t a story plot flowing between both stories. That being said, there may be spoilers The Housemaid in the below. Any spoilers for this book will be hidden as normal.

I went into The Housemaid’s Secret a bit apprehensively because I thought The Housemaid was damn near perfect – it got 4.5 stars! And I just wasn’t quite sure how a sequel to it would go. Then a colleague at work who is trying to read more has decided to pick up Freida’s books and began with The Housemaid and loved it. So, I said I’d read the second one with her as a sort of buddy read – though not really since she doesn’t know what that is ha.

Sadly, The Housemaid’s Secret wasn’t it for me! For the majority of the book I felt like the was nothing really going on. I’m not sure when I started to try and come up with theories on what the twist would be in this book, but I have to say I liked my theories a lot more than what it turned out to be!

The ending of The Housemaid suggests that the sequel books would probably be Nina or Enzo helping Millie get connected to women who need help leaving their partners so she can do so in her special way. But I imagined that would quickly feel like the same story being told over and over again which would feel repetitive quickly. So, I wasn’t sure what we’d get in The Housemaids Secret. The first half of the book did feel slow and it didn’t have the same grip that the first book had.

The second half of this book, I did enjoy. And I got the excitement from reading that I have felt while reading other Freida books! I liked Freida’s twists and I really do like Millie as a character. I appreciate that it felt like she had grown a bit as a character between books – though I did find myself complaining that she was making silly choices again. The twists in The Housemaid’s secret, just like with The Housemaid, didn’t feel so far fetched! It added an element of ‘oh shit this could really happen’. I do love that about the books I’ve read of Freida’s so far.

Even though I definitely rate the second half higher than the first, unfortunately elements of the ending felt rushed for me, like the explanation was too easily given. So it wasn’t perfect. That being said, there were elements of the ending that do make me excited to read the third book – even if I haven’t yet decided if I will.

As you can see I’m pretty torn about this one! On one hand, the book was slow and then when it got interesting things felt rushed. And on the other hand, I love our FMC and Freida’s twists are excellent, and even though some elements of the ending felt rushed overall I really liked the ending.

I settled on a 2.5 stars for this one. I probably wouldn’t recommend it, even if you loved The Housemaid. But if you want to read Freida’s catalogue then it’s not bad enough to skip, not at all. I just didn’t gel with it in the way that I had with The Housemaid.

Reading With Tyler