The Housemaid

The Housemaid is a psychological thriller by the American writer Freida McFadden, published in 2022. It is the first book in the Housemaid series, and it is set on Long Island.

The narrator takes a live-in job cleaning for the Winchester family and is glad of it: a room on the top floor, a child to collect from school, meals to cook and a household that seems to need her. Nina, the wife, makes messes for her to clean and tells odd lies about her own daughter, and the husband, Andrew, seems more broken each day.

The narrator tries on one of Nina's dresses just once, to see how the other half lives, and Nina soon finds out. Then she works out what the lock on her bedroom door actually does, and the arrangement she thought she had entered begins to look like something else.

The novel is told from inside the maid's point of view, so the reader learns the household only as she does, and it keeps back the parts of the story she does not yet know. It was adapted into a film in 2025.