If You Liked The Housemaid, Here's What to Read Next
Bookdot Team • •
#the housemaid#freida mcfadden#domestic thriller#readalikes#psychological thriller#plot twist
Millie Calloway walks into the Winchester house with a prison record, a duffel bag, and nowhere else to go, and takes a live-in housekeeping job that comes with a room in the attic — one that locks from the outside. Nina Winchester, her new employer, is beautiful, wealthy, and unraveling in ways that seem to have no reasonable explanation: wine spilled on white carpet minutes after Millie cleans it, closets rearranged overnight, outbursts that don’t match anything Millie has actually done. Freida McFadden published The Housemaid in 2022, and it became the rare thriller that spread almost entirely by word of mouth — readers finishing it in a single sitting and immediately texting someone else to read it too, just so there’d be another person to talk to about what happens in the second half.
What makes the book more than a locked-room gimmick is how completely it commits to reversing the reader’s sympathies. You spend the first section of the novel certain you understand who’s dangerous and who’s trapped in that house — and McFadden has built the whole structure around making sure you’re wrong, more than once, in ways that recast every scene that came before. It isn’t a twist bolted onto the end; it’s a narrator whose account of her own life you were never given full access to, unspooling in real time.
That’s the specific hunger this book leaves behind: not just “another thriller,” but another narrator with something to hide, another glossy household concealing rot, another ending built to make you want to flip back to page one. Here are nine books that deliver it.
What You’re Actually Chasing
Before the list, it’s worth naming the mechanics McFadden is running, because “domestic thriller” covers a lot of ground and The Housemaid is doing something more specific than most books filed under it.
The outsider narrator with a record gives the book its tension from page one — Millie isn’t a blank-slate protagonist, she’s someone with a documented reason not to be trusted, which means the reader is doing the same defensive calculation her new employers are. The class gap between staff and household turns every interaction into something loaded: Millie needs this job in a way that makes her swallow behavior she shouldn’t, and that need becomes a vulnerability the plot exploits. The gaslighting-shaped mystery — is Nina cruel, or is something else going on entirely — keeps the reader recalculating who the actual victim is for most of the book. And underneath all of it is McFadden’s signature structural whiplash: short chapters, close first-person narration, and a willingness to hand you a version of events and then take it back.
The books below deliver one or more of these ingredients — some lean hardest into the class tension, others into the narrator with a buried past, others into the sheer twist-per-chapter pacing McFadden is known for.
The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden — For Staying With Millie
Start here if you finished The Housemaid and immediately wanted more of Millie specifically. In this 2023 sequel, Millie is rebuilding her life — studying social work, dating a stable lawyer — when she takes a new housekeeping job for Douglas Garrick, a wealthy CEO, and his wife Wendy, who appears to be confined to her room by illness. Millie starts noticing signs she recognizes from her own past: bruises, secrecy, a woman who seems to be hiding something worse than sickness. True to form, McFadden spends the whole book letting you believe you understand the shape of the danger before revealing you don’t.
The Housemaid connection: The same protagonist, the same wealthy household concealing something behind a locked door, and a structure built to make you trust the wrong read on a marriage.
The Housemaid Is Watching by Freida McFadden — For Finishing the Story
The third and final book in the trilogy jumps forward about a decade: Millie, now a social worker married to Enzo, moves her family into a Long Island suburb, only to find her new neighbors unsettling and their housemaid, Martha, even more so. When a neighbor turns up dead, Millie’s own past as a convicted felon makes her an easy target for suspicion all over again — this time with her husband and children in the crosshairs. It closes out the series by putting Millie back on the other side of the housemaid relationship, watching a household the way the Winchesters once watched her.
The Housemaid connection: Millie’s story reaches its conclusion, the “trusted insider who sees too much” role gets flipped onto a new character, and the series’ pattern of blackmail and buried motive plays out one more time.
Never Lie by Freida McFadden — For More Pure McFadden Whiplash
If what you loved was McFadden’s specific gift for the rug-pull, not the Housemaid universe itself, Never Lie is the purest dose available. Married couple Tricia and Ethan get snowed into a remote house that belonged to a psychiatrist, Adrienne Hale, who vanished three years earlier. Trapped by the storm, Tricia finds a room full of cassette tapes from Adrienne’s old therapy sessions — and starts listening, unaware that the tapes are about to unravel secrets belonging to her own marriage as much as Adrienne’s disappearance.
The Housemaid connection: The same short, propulsive chapters, a narrator with more buried in her past than she admits even to herself, and a reveal engineered to detonate everything you thought you understood about the setup.
The Maid by Nita Prose — For the Domestic Worker Who Notices Everything
Molly Gray keeps the Regency Grand Hotel’s rooms immaculate and takes genuine pride in it — she also struggles to read social cues the way people around her seem to effortlessly manage, which makes her an easy person for others to underestimate and, eventually, to frame. When Molly finds wealthy guest Charles Black dead in his room, her awkwardness reads to Detective Stark as guilt, and Molly has to prove her innocence using the one skill nobody credited her with: paying close attention to a household most people walk past without seeing.
Where Millie survives by staying quiet and watchful in the Winchester house, Molly survives the same way in the Regency Grand — an employee whose attentiveness to a wealthy world is mistaken for invisibility, until it becomes the thing that saves her.
The Housemaid connection: A domestic worker underestimated by the wealthy people she serves, a wrongful-suspicion plot that turns the “help” into a convenient suspect, and a protagonist whose close observation of a household is her real power.
The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins — For the Outsider Who Marries Into the Secret
Rachel Hawkins’s 2021 thriller drops Jane, a broke dog-walker with a carefully hidden past of her own, into Thornfield Estates, a gated Alabama community where she meets Eddie Rochester — recently widowed after his wife Bea, a lifestyle-brand mogul, drowned in a boating accident. As Jane gets pulled deeper into Eddie’s orbit and the life he offers her, she can’t shake a growing unease about what actually happened to Bea, or about the strange thumping sounds coming from somewhere she isn’t supposed to ask about.
Like Millie, Jane is an outsider using a fabricated version of herself to survive inside a world of money that was never built for her — and Hawkins, like McFadden, keeps you guessing about which woman in the story is actually the one in danger.
The Housemaid connection: A narrator with a hidden past infiltrating a wealthy household, a marriage that isn’t what it appears to be, and unexplained sounds from somewhere in the house that turn out to matter enormously.
Verity by Colleen Hoover — For Moving Into the House That Holds the Secret
Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer, takes a job finishing the remaining books in bestselling author Verity Crawford’s series after Verity is left incapacitated by an accident — and moves into the Crawford family’s Vermont home to sort through her office. While there, Lowen finds an unfinished autobiography Verity never meant anyone to read, full of admissions that recontextualize everything about the Crawford marriage and the deaths of Verity’s daughters.
Like The Housemaid, the horror here isn’t just what’s found — it’s the position of being inside someone else’s home, sorting through their most private material, and realizing you can no longer trust the family you’re now living alongside.
The Housemaid connection: A narrator who moves into a wealthy household and uncovers a document that reframes everything, a family concealing something far darker than grief, and an ending that refuses to let you fully settle the truth.
First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston — For the Narrator Whose Whole Identity Is a Lie
Ashley Elston’s 2024 breakout follows Evie Porter — except that isn’t her real name. Hired by a mysterious employer to infiltrate the life of businessman Ryan Sumner, Evie has built an entire relationship, an entire persona, around a con she doesn’t fully understand the purpose of, alternating between her manufactured present and the past that turned her into someone who does this for a living.
Millie’s carefully managed secret — the record she doesn’t volunteer, the version of herself she presents to the Winchesters — becomes, in Elston’s hands, the entire architecture of a novel: a protagonist whose real self and performed self are never quite the same person.
The Housemaid connection: A narrator hiding her true identity from the wealthy people around her, dual timelines that dole out her real history in pieces, and a plot that depends entirely on the reader not knowing what she knows.
The Guest List by Lucy Foley — For the Household Staff Who See It All
Lucy Foley’s 2020 bestseller gathers a wedding party on a remote island off the Irish coast, where the marriage between magazine publisher Jules and TV presenter Will collides with old grudges, buried resentments, and — once the lights cut out during the storm — a body. Foley splits the narration across guests, bridesmaids, and the wedding staff themselves, including the planner running the event from the margins of everyone else’s celebration.
It’s a wider cast than The Housemaid’s claustrophobic two-hander, but the instinct is the same: the people paid to keep a glamorous event running smoothly are the ones who actually clock what’s happening, long before the guests they’re serving do.
The Housemaid connection: Working staff whose vantage point on the wealthy people around them becomes the key to the mystery, a glossy surface hiding real menace, and a structure that keeps reassigning who you should be worried about.
The Au Pair by Emma Rous — For the Decades-Old Household Secret
Emma Rous’s 2019 thriller opens with a tragedy: on the day Seraphine Mayes and her twin brother Danny were born at the family’s Norfolk coast estate, their mother threw herself from the cliffs, and their au pair vanished the same day. Grown up now and grieving her father’s recent death, Seraphine finds a family photograph that raises an impossible question — the picture shows her mother holding only one newborn, not two — and starts tracking down the long-vanished au pair to find out what actually happened at Summerbourne.
Where Millie’s secrets live in her own past, The Au Pair buries its secret in the household itself, one generation deep, uncovered by someone who once should have been protected by the very family now keeping the truth from her.
The Housemaid connection: A domestic caregiver at the center of a household’s darkest secret, a dual-timeline structure that reveals the past in careful fragments, and a family whose polished exterior conceals something none of them will say out loud.
Tracking Your Way Through the Twist-a-Chapter Shelf
Domestic thrillers like this one reward a specific kind of reading memory — the moment three chapters later when you realize a detail you skimmed past was actually the whole plot, disguised as scenery. That’s exactly the kind of thing worth tracking: which authors earn their twists honestly, which narrators turned out to be hiding something you should have caught, which households were never what they looked like on page one.
A reading tracker earns its keep on a shelf like this. Logging which unreliable narrators actually landed for you, rating whether a twist felt earned or just loud, and keeping McFadden’s growing catalog straight from Hawkins’s and Elston’s means you’re never standing in a bookstore trying to remember whether you’ve already read this one. Bookdot lets you organize exactly this kind of reading — tracking books and series by author, tagging the twists that actually worked, and building your next read list before the current book’s ending has even fully landed.
The specific hunger The Housemaid leaves behind is a narrator you can’t quite trust, in a house you can’t quite trust either. The books above are the strongest answers currently in print. Start with whichever ingredient you missed most, and expect, eventually, to want them all.
Building a TBR full of unreliable narrators and household secrets? Bookdot tracks every thriller, every author, and every twist so your next read is always one tap away.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What books are similar to The Housemaid by Freida McFadden?
- Books similar to The Housemaid include its own sequels, The Housemaid's Secret and The Housemaid Is Watching, both by Freida McFadden, along with her earlier standalone Never Lie. Outside the series, The Maid by Nita Prose, The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins, and Verity by Colleen Hoover all deliver the same combination of an outsider narrator, a wealthy household hiding something, and a twist that reorganizes the entire plot.
- What should I read after finishing The Housemaid?
- Most readers go straight to The Housemaid's Secret to stay with Millie, then to The Housemaid Is Watching to finish her story. If you want the same whiplash-twist feeling in a new setting, First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston and The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins both center narrators whose entire identities are constructed lies, much like Millie's carefully hidden past.
- Are there other books about domestic workers with dangerous secrets, like The Housemaid?
- Yes — The Maid by Nita Prose follows a hotel housekeeper framed for a guest's murder, The Au Pair by Emma Rous centers a nanny hiding a decades-old family secret, and The Guest List by Lucy Foley gives wedding staff their own point of view on a night that turns lethal. All three use domestic or service workers as narrators who see what their wealthy employers assume nobody's watching for.