Blurb:

“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….

Review:

Every now and again, a book comes along that completely blows your mind and you have literally no idea how to review it. The Housemaid is one such book. It has pretty much everything you need in a psychological thriller: unreliable narrators, twists, gaslighting, good characters, bad characters and characters that you have no idea which is which and I loved every single word. 

The Housemaid starts with a prologue that hooked me from the very first page. I had lots of questions to which I wanted answers and I could not let go of this story until the very end. 

The narrators of this novel are Millie and Nina. The characters are so well drawn that they both got under my skin straight away and I had no idea who to believe. They are both keeping secrets and I really want to know what made them tick. 

It’s really difficult to write about The Housemaid without giving away spoilers but the plotting is among the best I have ever seen. There were so many times I thought I understood what was happening, only to be blindsided a few chapters later. 

There is a sequel to The Housemaid, which I’ll be reviewing nearer the time of release in February. I can’t wait to see where this story goes next!

The Housemaid is available from Amazon.