The Housemaid is Watching

Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid Series follows Millie Calloway, a young woman who uses violence to protect herself and other women from the violence of the men around them. She spent a decade in prison for killing a boy who was trying to rape her friend. Millie bashed his head with a paperweight until he died. Millie also had several other violent incidents on her record: She slashed a teacher’s tires because he threatened to fail her unless she let him touch her inappropriately, and punched a coworker at a diner for groping her.

In The Housemaid, Millie is living in her car and struggling to find work. She is hired as a live-in housemaid by Nina Winchester, a wealthy woman in her late 30s who has a daughter named Cecelia. Nina initially seems kind, though her behavior is increasingly erratic: Millie is given an attic room that locks from the outside; Nina is on antipsychotic medication after attempting to kill Cecelia when she was a baby; and Nina’s relationship with her husband Andrew deteriorates. Andrew and Millie start a relationship, but Millie soon finds out the truth: Andrew is a sadistic abuser. He locks Millie in the attic and tortures her; he also framed Nina for harming Cecelia and conspired to depict her as having a mental health condition to discredit her version of events after she confided about the abuse to Enzo, their landscaper whose sister was killed by her abusive husband. Nina left pepper spray in the attic for Millie, who uses it to attack Andrew, torturing him like he tortured her and Nina. It turns out that Nina hired Millie to goad her into killing Andrew. When Andrew dies of starvation in the attic, Nina tells the police Millie was given the week off. The police rule the death an accident, and Nina gives Millie money. Nina and Cecelia move to California. Millie finds a new job with a woman who is in an abusive relationship and promises to help her.

In The Housemaid’s Secret, Millie is hired by Douglas Garrick, a successful CEO, to care for his ill wife Wendy. Millie and Enzo once dated and helped women escape abusive relationships, but now Millie is dating a lawyer named Brock who doesn’t know about her past incarceration. Douglas is abusive toward Wendy; after a failed escape attempt, Millie witnesses Douglas strangling Wendy and shoots him with his own gun. However, Millie soon realizes that the man she killed was not the real Douglas—Wendy was having an affair with Russell Simonds, which the real Douglas found out about. Because of her infidelity, Wendy would get nothing in a divorce. Wendy then pretended to be in an abusive relationship, faking arguments and physical altercations with Russell. The gun Millie used to “kill” Douglas was loaded with a blank; Wendy later killed the real Douglas herself, hoping to frame Millie. With Enzo’s help, Millie helps Russell’s wife poison Wendy and Russell in revenge. Millie and Enzo resume their relationship and move in together.

In The Housemaid Is Watching, Millie and Enzo have been married for over 10 years and have two children. Millie is now a social worker, no longer at the mercy of wealthy families while Enzo is still a landscaper. The family lives a seemingly idyllic life in the suburbs of Long Island. However, secrets and deception soon threaten that life. McFadden continues to tug on thematic threads related to trauma and abuse, but in this novel, the building dread is less overt: Millie can sense something is wrong, but she cannot fully understand what is going on until someone winds up dead. Unlike in the first two novels of the series, Millie struggles to help those in immediate danger; in the end, she is not the one who utilizes violence to protect those in need, and her vigilante mantle passes to new characters.