Books Like The Housemaid: 9 Twisty Domestic Thrillers to Read Next
Unreliable narrators, rich families with rotten secrets and twists you will want to text someone about
Freida McFadden's The Housemaid is the book we hand to customers who say they have not been able to finish anything lately, because nobody fails to finish this one. A young woman with a past takes a live-in job with the wealthy, picture-perfect Winchester family, and within a few chapters you realise that every single person in that house is lying about something. The chapters are short, the narrator is not telling you everything, the power keeps changing hands, and the twists land like trapdoors: just when you think you know whose story this is, the floor gives way.
That combination (domestic setting, unreliable narration, rich-family rot, a twist every few chapters) is its own thriving genre, and the shelf runs deep. Here are nine we recommend at Ever After Books when someone finishes The Housemaid at 2am and comes in the next day asking what on earth to read now.
What to read if you love The Housemaid
The Housemaid's Secret by Freida McFadden
The obvious first stop: the direct sequel. Millie takes another job with another wealthy couple, hears something she should not through a closed door, and the trapdoor chapters start all over again. It keeps the short-chapter, one-more-page engine of the original and adds a new household of liars to pick apart. If you simply want that exact feeling again, it is right here.
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Never Lie by Freida McFadden
Many McFadden regulars rate this above The Housemaid, which is saying something. A newlywed couple viewing a remote house get snowed in, and the wife finds the hidden tapes of the previous owner, a famous psychiatrist who vanished. The transcripts pull you into a second story running underneath the first, and the final act rearranges everything you thought you had worked out. Ruthlessly efficient and ideal for a single stormy weekend.
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The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
You think you are reading about a bitter ex-wife obsessed with her replacement. You are not, and the moment you find out what you are actually reading is one of the great rug-pulls in the genre. Like The Housemaid, it weaponises your assumptions about which woman holds the power. Slower burning than McFadden, but the payoff is worth every page.
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Behind Closed Doors by B A Paris
Jack and Grace are the couple everyone envies: he is a handsome lawyer, she is the perfect hostess, and no one ever sees her alone. What is actually happening inside that immaculate house is the stuff of nightmares. This is the purest hit of The Housemaid's central trick, the gap between a family's flawless surface and its rotten inside, told with almost unbearable tension. Fair warning: it is the darkest book on this list.
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The Last Mrs Parrish by Liv Constantine
Amber Patterson is done being invisible, and she has a meticulous plan to insinuate herself into the gilded life of Daphne Parrish and then take her husband. Then the point of view flips, and the whole scheme looks very different. Perfect for readers who loved watching Millie and Nina circle each other: this is a two-woman chess match where you keep changing sides. Deliciously nasty, with a genuinely satisfying ending.
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The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
A nanny takes a suspiciously well-paid post at a luxurious smart home in the Scottish Highlands, and the book opens with her writing from prison, accused of killing a child in her care. Ware runs the same upstairs-downstairs voltage as The Housemaid, an outsider employee inside a rich family's walls, then wires the house itself against her: cameras, locked doors, footsteps overhead. Gothic, modern and very creepy.
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Verity by Colleen Hoover
A struggling writer is hired to finish the books of Verity Crawford, a bestselling novelist left unable to communicate after an accident, and in the family's house she finds a manuscript that reads like a confession. Is it truth or fiction? The book never lets you settle, and the final pages will send you straight back to reread earlier chapters. Steamier than McFadden and even more divisive at book clubs, which is half the fun.
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The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
Alicia Berenson shot her husband five times and has not spoken a single word since. The therapist determined to make her talk narrates, and he is exactly as trustworthy as narrators in this genre ever are. Less domestic bustle, more psychological chess, but the twist is a genuine gasp-out-loud moment that stands beside anything McFadden has pulled off. One of the bestselling debuts of its decade for a reason.
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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The modern blueprint. Nick's wife Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, and his account of the marriage starts to fall apart in public, alternating with her diary. Every trick The Housemaid plays brilliantly (dual perspectives, unreliable narration, a marriage as crime scene) was sharpened here first, with prose that bites. If you somehow have not read it, you are in for a treat; if you read it years ago, it rereads beautifully.
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Keep the streak going
One twisty read deserves another. Let What Should I Read Next? take your favourites from this list and match you with your next 2am finish, stack the rest on your TBR list, and browse our Thrillers collection for more households you should never trust.