“Welcome to the family,” Nina Winchester says as I shake her elegant, manicured hand. I smile politely, gazing around the marble hallway. Working here is my last chance to start fresh. I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I’ll soon learn that the Winchesters’ secrets are far more dangerous than my own…

Every day I clean the Winchesters’ beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.

I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew’s handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it’s hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina’s life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.

I only try on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it’s like. But she soon finds out… and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it’s far too late.

But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don’t know who I really am.

They don’t know what I’m capable of…

---

I read this book the day after I got rattled by The Quiet Tenant. Such a good book – split into three parts and a few separate POVs – the maid (Millie) rules the first half of the book while the wife (Nina) rules the second. We get to see the games they played with each other and that the clueless husband caught in the middle between wife and affair partner is not so innocent after all.

Millie is down on her luck. Homeless and lying through her teeth to her parole officer about having a job and having a house (like they can’t call and check) as not to break the conditions of her release. She accepts a job (very well paid) that turns out it’s not the coveted position she was hoping it would be but more a whipping horse for the wife, Nina, who hired her and seems to be completely crazy.

But really, what can I do? The Winchesters are paying me well, but not well enough to strike out on my own without at least a few more paychecks under my belt. If I quit, they’ll never give me a decent recommendation. I’ll have to go back to searching through the want ads, faced with rejection after rejection when they find out about my prison record.

I’ve read stories and real-life examples of how some really determined women have turned their fate around by hard work and dedication like in the “Maid * Stephanie Land” book.

I had to do a double-take though when Millie starts falling for the husband.

I put my hand on his—a gesture meant to comfort him. He turns his hand and gives my hand a squeeze. At the touch of his palm against mine, a sensation shoots through me like a lightning bolt. It’s something I’ve never felt before. I look up at Andrew’s brown eyes, and I can tell he feels it, too. For a moment, the two of us just stare at each other, drawn together by some invisible, indescribable connection. Then his face turns red.

I was like! Noooooo – woman! You got a steady job, while the wife is cray-cray, you don’t go for the husband!

I say that Nina wouldn’t enjoy finding out that her husband took me to a Broadway show and then treated me to an expensive French dinner. But what the hell. We’re already here, and it’s not like the meal would make her more mad than the show alone. May as well go for broke. “Sounds good.”

Well, she lost my sympathy here.

You have Nina’s story from the Maid’s point of view: She’s been committed to a psychiatric institution, she’d taken drugs, she’d try to drown her own daughter. She runs the PTA and wears only white expensive items. She has a hot gardner and a hot husband. She has a big mansion with gates in the front. She doesn’t clean, throws fits and accuses Millie of random things out of the blue just to mess with her. Sends her on a last-minute errand to pick up her daughter from school when she had another mom already arranged and then denies culpability.

I didn’t like Millie for what she did, and didn’t like Nina for apparently suffering from unmedicated BPD

So yes, I slept with my married boss.
After he kissed me in the taxi, there was no going back

The first half of the book ends with the husband asking for a separation from the wife and the Maid now sleeping in the “open” with the married catch.

I like Andrew. No, I don’t just like him. I’m in love with him. […] Andrew owns the house. And if they weren’t married, she couldn’t live here. If he decided to choose me over her, this would be my house. […] I swallow. I’ve had enough of Nina’s games. Starting tomorrow, I’m taking back this house. I’m calling a locksmith to change the locks on the doors. And tonight, I’m spending the night in the master bedroom. Enough of this guest bedroom bullshit. I’m not a guest here anymore.
Andrew said he wanted this to become permanent. So now, this is my home too.

Second part of the book comes with the twist that “spoiler”: Nina was only acting crazy in hopes her husband would lose interest in her and divorce her. Even walking away with nothing other than the clothes on her back and her daughter would be a win for her. Because … * drumroll * .. her husband is a controlling and abusive little shit that likes to lock up people in the attic room without water or food and enact punishment for perceived slights.

So this was a fantastic book as well BUT, compared to The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon, while they did share some themes like being held captive against your will, psychological torture, physical torture – it didn’t contain any sexual abuse suffered by the main characters. Because I read the two books in quick succession, I did like them both but loved/hated The housemaid a bit for how it did Nina dirty.

The good parts: Nina hired Millie strategically, knowing fully her ex-prison status and why she went to prison: bashing a guy’s head in with a paperweight when she caught him raping one of her friends at a student party. And a violent past.

The bad parts: Nina never told Millie about her husband’s violent nature and only planned to drive them together so she would get out. Only the hot hunk gardner Enzo seems to have a moral compass here as he tells her over and over again it’s not right to do a swap.

The very bad parts: Breaking character, Nina decides to go back to the house she had with her husband after a week or so, and even though she left Millie in there to fend for herself much as she did, Millie could have been dead by the time she returned filled with remorse and ready to take the fall. Nina, breaking character once more (she was always self-serving), decides to tell Millie she can go after she finds her husband dead and proclaims to take the fall for a murder she didn’t commit (well, she did it by proxy).

Her only get out of jail card was that one of the detectives’ daughters was actually her husband’s first fiancee who moved away and cut contact with men and he wanted to avenge his daughter. Deux ex machina much? Flaky ending as hell. It’s this change of heart that seems so unnatural.

But what it really comes down to is that I just couldn’t. I didn’t have it in me to take his life. And I did something terrible: I tried to trick Millie into killing him.
Which she did.
And now she could spend the rest of her life paying for it if I don’t do something to help her.

And then to make matters worse, Millie becomes a contract hire 😀 – after showing up again on the job market, she gets hired in another posh household where this time the husband is a wife-beater by Nina’s recommendations. Like – you solved my problem and somehow escaped, here’s another problem to solve.

Otherwise, the book was fantastic. Title was a bit long (No, I didn’t type it in) but it did have the twist it promised and was gruesome enough that I enjoyed it.

Books In This Series (3 Books)

Complete series

The Housemaid

Kindle Edition

1. The Housemaid: An absolutely addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Freida McFadden 4.4 out of 5 stars (293,253) Kindle Edition £1.99
2. The Housemaid’s Secret: A totally gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist Freida McFadden 4.4 out of 5 stars (155,193) Kindle Edition £2.99
3. The Housemaid Is Watching: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller packed with twists Freida McFadden Kindle Edition £2.99