How did The Boyfriend end? (spoilers) | Freida McFadden
Only a little overlap because of course I have my spoiler-free review on my main page. Here, we’re going to talk spoilers for Frieda McFadden’s new book, The Boyfriend, and I can promise they are juicy!
McFadden has been crushing it in the sales, and her new book was selected as a Book of the Month pick this month, which tells me they (BOTM) are trying to get new subscribers by baiting them with a big fish. Clever! I can’t hate the game, BOTM. Money makes the book world go around. Let’s get into The Boyfriend! The teaser for the book is honestly not helpful at all, though I find that is common for Freida McFadden books. Since we’re hanging over here though, we can speak freely because that synopsis is giving us nothing! Maybe that is part of the fun though…
What is The Boyfriend really about?
The Boyfriend starts out with a woman named Sydney Shaw who is on a complete nightmare date. Sydney shows up to find a man who looks nothing like the picture of the handsome man, Kevin, who she’d been talking to. Sydney stays for the date anyway.
[I hope women reading this know that it is a bad idea—this man is a catfish!]Freida loves a very dumb, female protagonist who makes terrible decisions, and Sydney Shaw is that to a T. But of course, if she hadn’t stayed on the date, we might have lost Kevin who is…a piece of work. On the date, Kevin makes her pay half the bill mostly covering his food. He’s rude, unattractive, and has terrible social skills.
[Are you asking why Sydney stuck around? You should be, because this is a lesson to all women out there (including me)—it is not rude to set boundaries, especially with a creep who makes you uncomfortable.]Sydney does not set boundaries, though. She actually pays the bill and lets him walk her home. She realizes she doesn’t want him to know where she lives, and brings him to an apartment a few blocks from hers. Kevin won’t leave though, and when he gets too persistent (on a dark street where Sydney led him alone with no plan…) Sydney is saved by a handsome man. Sydney is over her near assault in an instant, because she is into this stranger. Alas, he leaves without picking up her hint to exchange numbers.
[Damn… Sydney girl, go heal home and call your mom!]In the past, a teenager named Tom is in love with a girl named Daisy, but he has so much going on. His dad is an abusive drunk. His lab partner hates him. And he can’t stop picturing what Daisy’s blood looks like.
[That’s weird, Tom. I won’t pretend otherwise. Sorry about your dad, though!]
Tom has a best friend who is nicknamed Slug and he’s gross.
[Freida has no chill when it comes to characters that we are not supposed to like. They are like caricatures of gross people.]
Slug is described as a boy with massive acne, he’s unclean, rude, makes gross noises, eats bugs. Kevin is the same way, so of course you can imagine that the reader wonders if Kevin may actually be Slug all grown up… We’ll get to that.
Daisy’s father is the chief of police, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that Tom was secretly dating a girl in town who was murdered before he began dating Daisy. Also Tom’s dad comes home drunk and Tom kills him (this does seem to be self defense though). Slug comes over to help him and Daisy’s best friend (and Tom’s lab partner) Allison sees them and asks what they are doing. Her dog also goes crazy barking at the trunk, which Tom and Slug inexplicably say has raw hamburger meat in it.
[Excuse me? This is like an episode of Tiger King.]
Anyway Slug tells Tom they need to do something about Allison, but Tom says no. Allison is found dead the next day and Tom is suddenly in the crosshairs of the police. Oh Tom…
How do the two stories tie together?
Sydney has two best friends, Bonnie and Gretchen. Bonnie is a grade A hottie and she is the only woman on the planet cool enough to pull off wearing scrunchies, according to Freida.
[Has Freida been on tiktok or out and about? Tons of women wear scrunchies—I cannot deal with how frequently this scrunchie came up or was part of the storyline.]
Anyway, Gretchen is dating the maintenance man Randy in the apartment building where Bonnie and Sydney live. Randy is another tall, lanky guy who is kind of creepy and not attractive (just like Kevin and Slug).
[Everyone is either massively hot or a completely disgusting in Freida’s world. There is no in-between.]Bonnie is a serial dater but it seems she may be in love with a mystery man. Sydney arranges to be in her apartment one morning when Randy goes in to repair the toilet and instead they find Bonnie brutally murdered in her bed. Oh no! Sydney wonders about Randy when she learns there was no forced entry because he has the keys, but according to the police he has an alibi—he was with Gretchen all night. The detective working the case also happens to be Sydney’s ex-boyfriend Jake. They broke up after two years because she thought he prioritized work over their relationship, and she talks about this a lot.
[Constantly.]A month later and they haven’t found Bonnie’s killer, though they believe it was someone she was dating and met on an NYC dating app (also where Sydney met Kevin, who continues to pop up in random places and beg her to give him another chance). Sydney can’t mourn forever, though, and she’s on a great first date with a handsome guy when the hot stranger who saved her from Kevin appears. In the middle of a massive nosebleed, in fact. Her date books it—he’s grossed out by blood and Sydney has a disorder that makes her bleed much more than normal. But the hot stranger doesn’t run away. In fact, he asks her to go to dinner with him that night, and she says yes. He is a medical examiner and introduces himself properly. His name is Tom. Ok… here we go!
How does it end?
Sydney and Tom date for a few months but he is absolutely full of red flags, and not just because we are following his story in the past as well. He is clearly using a burner phone (just like the one Bonnie’s murderer used) and he doesn’t want to go to her building. He lies about which hospital he works at. And he regularly turns cold towards Sydney but gets hot and bothered any time she bleeds.
[That’s still weird, Tom.]One night Tom goes to take a shower after they have a romp in the bed and Sydney drops her phone on the floor. When she picks it up, she finds… a black scrunchie!
[Obviously this is Bonnie’s because in Freida’s world, a black scrunchie is so unique as to be only linked to a single human.]Sydney also confirms the burner phone, and so she takes Tom’s water bottle and hands it over to Jake to test for fingerprints.
They match ones found in Bonnie’s apartment! And the apartment of another woman who was murdered! Ok… so Tom is the killer, right? Wrong. He has an airtight alibi at work the night of Bonnie’s murder. Sydney is bemoaning what to do now that she accused her boyfriend of murder, but Tom shows up to talk anyway. Sydney doesn’t want to, and breaks up with him.
[Ice cold, Sydney! You were the one who turned over his fingerprints to police.]
Before he leaves, Gretchen and Randy walk up and Tom looks panicked. He tries to get Sydney to talk to him but she refuses and goes upstairs to have dinner with Gretchen and Randy. Tom texts her that she’s in danger, and instead of heeding that warning or trying to find out what that means, she blocks his number.
[Why is this woman so stupid???]Meanwhile she finds a bag in the back of Randy’s toilet that has locks of women’s hair in it. So… I guess it’s Randy, right? And we are all thinking this is Slug, which is why Tom reacted the way he did.
It’s not Slug. In the past, we see Tom go to Daisy’s to ask her to talk after her father accuses him of murder and refuses to let her speak to him. They agree to meet behind a Dairy Queen after midnight, but Slug overhears. Tom panics that Slug is going to murder Daisy because she knows what Allison saw that night. At the Dairy Queen, Tom finds two vehicles and realizes they are both there. Oh no! He runs around back and finds someone standing over a dead body. Is Daisy dead??? No. Daisy killed Slug who is bleeding out on the ground. It turns out Daisy also killed the other two girls because she’s so in love with Tom and they were threatening to disrupt everything. What??
Slug is dead so we know he’s not Randy. Before we can puzzle too much on that, Randy passes out and Sydney falls to the floor, drugged as well. Gretchen put something in the wine.
[Gretchen!]It turns out Gretchen is Daisy, which is why Tom was freaking out. They are both in the apartment and Daisy is explaining everything. She has been killing every woman Tom tried to date after they broke up. Now, she plans to kill Sydney and Randy as well (actually, she does kill Randy in front of Sydney). Tom agrees to go on the run with her and be together if she spares Sydney. They argue over whether they can continue to murder people together or not, and Tom is of the opinion that they only murder people who deserve it. Daisy is a bit less discerning.
[Daisy honestly will take out anyone at any time and that level of unhinged is pure fun in a book like this!]In the epilogue, it’s a month later and Sydney and Jake are back together. Tom and Daisy haven’t been spotted since the night of Randy’s murde. One day Sydney opens a package in the mail and finds a lock of hair and a note explaining that Kevin won’t be bothering her anymore.
[I was grossed out by this, largely because Frieda chose to describe the hair as scraggly.]What did I think?
There’s some good and some not-so-good here! I liked that there were plenty of possible suspects, and though they were too obviously red herrings, it was fun to have obvious contenders to link Tom and Slug to the present story. I also felt the pacing was better than usual. The past and present storylines helped because frankly, we needed a break from Sydney. I also think that while you may guess some parts (I was pretty sure it was Gretchen or Randy from the beginning, and by the second half I figured out Gretchen was Daisy), I doubt anyone will be able to put this together fully. The ending was completely over the top but in a fun campy way.
I think my biggest issue with Freida’s books is how unidimensional the characters are. They don’t remotely feel like real people. Sydney is her classic lead—an attractive woman in her late 20s or early 30s who lacks all common sense and ends every chapter worrying she made a mistake (she did). Jake was also flat—I think we were supposed to like him, but he was like a generic hot guy who violated all of his work norms which frankly seemed out of character. Tom was weird and seemed like a psycho, though teenage Tom was more dimensional. I actually think teenage Tom was one of the most developed characters I’ve read from Freida. On the other hand, Slug, Kevin, and Randy were just presented as disgusting. We were hit over the head with the comparisons between Slug and Kevin to the point that I felt positive that they were absolutely not the same person.
What about that ending? It seemed so obvious that Kevin was Slug, which made it clear he wouldn’t be the same person. Freida’s style is to shove a red herring so far down our throats that we nearly choke, only to pull a blindside or two that sometimes make sense and others don’t. But I think that is why her books can be fun! Sydney’s friend Gretchen is Daisy, it turns out. She was playing the long game when she realized Bonnie and Tom were hooking up and found a way to befriend Bonnie and Sydney. She lucked out that Tom’s next girlfriend happened to be Sydney, I guess. She’d already put in the work so she could ride it out until her next murder! I really didn’t think she needed to go so far as dating Randy, but I suppose he was always intended to be the scapegoat.
One of Sydney’s most moronic moments comes when Gretchen slips up and reveals that she wasn’t with Randy the night of the murder. Immediately I became suspicious of Gretchen because Randy wouldn’t have gone to the apartment in the morning like nothing happened. It made no sense. By then I guessed Gretchen had to be Daisy, because it was the only thing that made sense. She’s the only person who would want to sabotage all of Tom’s relationships; that didn’t feel like Slug at all so I assumed he was no longer around.
Did I like the twist? Honestly, yes. I thought it was fun and it made sense. One of my biggest complaints with Freida’s books (though she’s not nearly as bad as Mary Kubica…) is that sometimes the twists seem like such a blindside because they don’t make sense. In this case, I thought it was well-plotted. This was one of her better books in terms of plot structure and how different red herrings were introduced. As always they were a bit heavy handed, but I didn’t mind it. This was a fun book. Freida! I wouldn’t mind a sequel!
Let’s talk about the epilogue, where this might go from here, and where I saw similarities to another book. Sometimes I do think Freida is too inspired by other books where it verges into copying. Here, I felt like it was more like fan fiction inspired by A Twisted Love Story by Samantha Downing. A fresh story, different characteristics, but it still had that fun toxic relationship vibe that made A Twisted Love Story iconic. If you haven’t read it, check it out! The endings were the most similar part, but I felt like it’s more of an ode to that book rather than a copy. The stories are unique, but the themes are similar. Where does it go from here? I loved that Tom and Daisy ran off together to be crazy. These two are explosive in every way—I wondered if Freida is planning a sequel focusing on them. We can leave Sydney behind; she’s run her course. Daisy and Tom are where the real story is! I’d follow them on their psychotic tour of the United States taking out creeps like Kevin.
A fun book, I recommend it if you just want something quick, engaging, and not too deep. The dual narratives worked well to prevent the mid-book repetitiveness that I’ve noticed in other books. Tom’s past storyline added depth. I was interested in Tom as a character in a way I’m not with other characters. Daisy also ended up being more interesting than she seemed.
Freida is always a rollercoaster for me, but this one pulled me in. I’ll catch you for the next one!
