The Housemaid’s Secret (spoilers and ending explained) | Freida McFadden
Are you following Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid trilogy? I had read the first book two years ago but didn’t post my review until recently. In my spoiler post, I talked a bit about the comparison between The Housemaid and another popular book (you can check that out here). However, the sequel to The Housemaid came out before the sequel to the other book. I was curious to see how this series would do separating from the inspiration material (allegedly). Let’s get into the plot summary and ending of The Housemaid’s Secret and see how it measures up to the first book!
What is The Housemaid’s Secret about?
Our beautiful and unhinged ex-con Millie is back and she has some surprises in store for us. If you don’t need a review of the plot, you can jump straight to my thoughts on the book and how to unpack that ending. I am not going to mention the prologue because I often find prologues to be annoying (this one included).
Part I
The Set Up
Millie is back to working as a housemaid at the stately home of Amber Degraw. The schedule plus a bit of babysitting allows Millie to take classes at a local community college in hopes of earning her degree. Since we last saw her, Millie dated Enzo (remember the landscaper from the first book? I thought he was into Nina, but I guess this is where Freida has decided to go), and the two started a partnership saving women from their abusive husbands. She is now seeing a handsome lawyer named Brock who has no clue about her past. Definitely not the murders or the ten years in prison.
Amber fires Millie when she sees her baby calling Millie mama instead of her. Dejected, Millie knows how hard it will be for her to find a new job given that she can’t pass a background check (she’s trying to go legit now!). At her apartment, Millie gets into an altercation when a creepy neighbor gets a bit too friendly; she pepper sprays him and he falls down the stairs. Despite her claims it was self-defense, the neighbors saw her kicking him in the ribs while unconscious (she did actually kick him…Millie can’t help being Millie!). Unfortunately, this also means she needs to move in with Brock and he will find out about her past history with the law.
The Garricks
Eventually, she finds her next position working for Douglas and Wendy Garrick, who live in an upper west side penthouse. Things are a bit strange at the Garrick house. Douglas is kind and handsome, but Millie hasn’t even met Wendy, who rarely leaves the guest room. She’s suffered from an “illness” since they were married. There is little cleaning to do, but they leave Millie detailed lists about what food to prepare, where to purchase ingredients, and when.
Things get stranger with the Garricks. Blood stains on Wendy’s nightgown in the hamper, a bloody handprint in the bathroom, and Douglas is hot and cold. Millie finally gets a glimpse of Wendy when she forces her to open the door and finds a woman with bruises covering her face (Yikes! That’s like catnip for Millie). What is really going on here? Even stranger, Millie gets a call from the paper that her ad never actually ran. How did the Garricks get her number?
The Battered Wife
Wendy admits she got Millie’s number from a woman named Ginger who Millie and Enzo had helped a few years back (aka, killed her husband). She needs help getting out of her marriage, and the two make a plan to send Wendy to stay with a friend. Millie rents a car and drives Wendy to Albany. She returns home, but Wendy calls the next day to tell her that Douglas was there when she arrived and brought her home. Douglas lets Millie go, worried she will talk to Wendy and learn the truth (he doesn’t know Millie was the one who helped her).
On Millie’s last day, she hears a big fight between Douglas and Wendy and the sound of Douglas choking her. Millie takes his gun and shoots Douglas (oh, Millie…you just can’t help yourself). He dies (obviously). Wendy tells Millie she will tell the police an intruder shot Douglas and that Millie should go home (at this point we are all thinking it probably would make more sense to stay and show them she was protecting Wendy, but Millis is an ex-con so I suppose I see her point). There are no working cameras and Wendy tells Millie to erase the text messages from her and Douglas so Millie won’t be tied to the events of the evening.
The Next Day
Of course things can never go as planned, right? The NYPD arrive at Millie’s in the morning and bring her to the station to question her. They have a very different view of things. They accuse Millie of having an affair with Douglas. She insists she didn’t, but the evidence is compelling. They have texts from his burner phone (Millie didn’t know it was a burner phone, of course) to Millie, but only the ones where he was asking her to come over at night. Millie says these were to arrange her cleaning schedule, but they don’t believe her. None of the other texts are left to show the rest of the conversation. Unfortunately, Millie also deleted them from her phone on the advice of Wendy (are you suspicious Wendy framed Millie yet? You should be).
They also know about the motel room in Albandy that Millie booked in her own name. Did she know Douglas happened to be in Albany the same night for work? (Of course she didn’t, Wendy told her he was across the country for work) Millie tries to explain the motel was for a different reason but they don’t listen to her. And on top of everything, Brock is her attorney present, so he has a front row seat to all of the times Millie lied to him about why she cancelled dates. He is not pleased, to say the least. And of course the smoking gun, as they say—Millie’s fingerprints are on the gun used to kill Douglas. Wendy promised to wipe them, but she obviously didn’t do that. The evidence of the affair keeps piling up, and Brock breaks up with her and tells her to find her own attorney. Shockingly, the police don’t arrest her and she leaves the station.
Millie, being the dumb-dumb that she always has been (she is seriously so stupid…she’s somehow dumber in this book than the last one), doesn’t call Brock to explain, or Enzo to help (did I mention Enzo resurfaced and has been tailing her to protect her? I’m rolling my eyes, but it’s true). Instead, Millie calls Wendy. Wendy! The woman who obviously framed her. Millie doesn’t see that, though. She thinks the police may have been lying about what Wendy told them and she’s hoping Wendy will set the record straight. Wendy doesn’t answer (obviously). Millie’s landlady tells her she has one week to move out because the police have now been here twice because of her.
The Twist
Millie turns on the news to see that the murder of Coinstock CEO Douglas Garrick is all over the news. A tearful Wendy is interviewed saying how amazing her husband was and how devastated she is that someone would murder him. Millie is shocked to hear it (Oh Millie, when will you see what is happening here?). But then they show a picture of the late Douglas Garrick. It’s a man Millie has never seen before in her life. So if this is Douglas Garrick, who did Millie murder the night before?
Part II
The Wife
Wendy opens the second part, and she wants to make sure we don’t think she is a terrible person. Her husband may not have beat her up, but he did humiliate her and ruin her life (according to Wendy), so she found a way to murder him.
Wendy and Douglas met four years earlier at a gallery, and she immediately fell for him (well, not for Douglas, but for his money). One year later, they are a couple. Wendy finds fault in everything about Douglas. He’s nerdy, sloppy, unrefined, and out of shape. But he does have money so she marries him anyway. Reluctantly, she signs a prenup. She won’t get everything, but she will get $10 million if they divorce. That doesn’t stop Wendy from complaining about everything. They have a 5 bedroom mansion on Long Island that Douglas loves, but Wendy insists they need a penthouse apartment in Manhattan too.
Her friend Audrey is the one who first tells her about Millie and her special skills. She helped their mutual friend Ginger get out of a bad marriage, and she’s helped plenty of others. Wendy is intrigued. Douglas continues to annoy her with how stingy he is, his constant chatter about wanting children, and his weight. A receptionist from Douglas’s office tells her about her husband’s antique shop, and Wendy decides to visit and shop for some new furniture for the penthouse. She meets the receptionist’s husband—a man named Russell. He’s what Douglas could be if he were fitter, more attractive, and charming.
The Affair
Wendy begins an affair with Russell and eventually falls in love with him. She takes him out for fancy meals and hotels on Douglas’s credit card, until one day when the cards are all declined. How embarrassing! She goes to the house on Long Island to ask Douglas and he tells her he knows all about her affair. He begs her to do marital counseling, but she doesn’t want to. Wendy tells him she can’t have kids, she doesn’t want kids, and she wants a divorce. She expects to get the $10 million, but he tells her that she doesn’t get anything if there is evidence of infidelity (Wendy is not quite as stupid as Millie, but she’s close).
Douglas tells her she can stay at the penthouse for now, but that he plans to list it in a few months. Wendy and Russell lay around in the master bedroom and puzzle over what they will do without access to Douglas’s money. She decides to get Millie to murder him for her. She hires her and sets it up to look like she is visiting to have an affair with “Douglas”, who is actually Russell. She uses make up to make her face look bruised and has Russell punch her to split her lip open (she can’t do that with make up, unfortunately).
The Murder
Wendy gets Millie to shoot Russell, but the gun only has blanks. After Millie leaves, she asks Douglas to come over with the divorce papers. It’s the first time he’s been to the penthouse in months. Russell chickens out from firing the gun (with real bullets) at Douglas, so Wendy puts on rubber gloves and does it herself. After she shoots Douglas, Russell leaves and Wendy sets everything up to blame Millie.
Part III
The Search
Millie calls Enzo because he is the only one who can verify that she drove back from Albany that night. She talks him through what happened and he points out that she never actually checked for a pulse herself and took Wendy’s word for it. Enzo has to spell it out for her but finally Millie realizes that Wendy set her up to go down for her husband’s murder. She remembers spotting the man she thought was Douglas going into a different building, and they track him down. Russell is alive and well, so now Millie knows she didn’t actually kill anyone. Russell has a cabin and Enzo suspected he may be staying there, so they plan to go confront him. Millie learns they found gun powder residue on her shirt from the night of the murder, and knows they plan to arrest her.
Part IV
The Celebration
Meanwhile Wendy and Russell are at his cabin celebrating their gross scheme with wine and bubble bath for two. Wendy heard that the police are planning to arrest Millie, and she’s sure they got away with it. The perfect crime! Or so they think… Douglas’s best friend Joe was also an attorney and the executor of his will. Wendy is annoyed that it took him so long to call her to give her access to all of Douglas’s money (the money she has been cut off from other than him paying the mortgage on the penthouse for her). Unfortunately for Wendy, Joe informs her that Douglas changed his will a month earlier. He left his entire estate to charity, and nothing to Wendy. She needs to vacate the penthouse immediately.
The Cameras
The detective working Douglas’s murder calls Wendy, and she’s excited to hear if they arrested Millie. They haven’t been able to locate her, but the detective had a different reason he called. It turns out there were cameras in the back entrance to the apartment building and they were installed by Douglas himself a year before his death. According to those, Douglas hadn’t visited the apartment in more than a year, so he couldn’t have been having an affair with Millie there. Even more strange, the footage showed Douglas arriving at the building the night of his murder after the doorman saw Millie leaving.
The Ending
Wendy panics and rushes in to get their stories straight with Russell. She finds him in the tub, dead. There’s blood in the bathwater and his eyes are glassy—his throat has been slashed. She immediately suspects Millie and starts begging her to see her side of things. It isn’t Millie, though. It’s Russell’s wife, Marybeth. She confronts Wendy about the ten-month affair with her husband and accuses Wendy of murdering Douglas with Russell. Mary Beth forces Wendy to write a full confession—both to the affair and the murder. She then tells her to write that she is the one who murdered Russell and that she plans to take her own life. Then she tells Wendy that she drugged the wine bottle with digoxin—Douglas’s heart medication—and that Wendy has already ingested the drugs that will kill her.
The next day, Millie is meeting with the detective who tells her she is cleared of all charges and that Wendy confessed before taking her own life. He tells Millie she has a reputation as a hero, and asks if he can be a resource if she ever needs one.
In the final scene, Millie and Enzo have moved in together. Brock comes by to get the last of his belongings and he asks if she has seen his bottle of digoxin that he had in her medicine cabinet. Millie says she hasn’t seen it and he leaves. Millie reveals that she is the one who told Marybeth about her husband’s affair with Wendy and asks about Russell’s life insurance policy. Then she gave Marybeth the digoxin and sent her to the cabin, where she murdered Wendy and Russell and made it look like it was self-inflicted.
What did I think
This was the test of what Freida would do with the series after she broke away from The Last Mrs. Parrish. She already brought some new twists at the very end of The Housemaid and in this book she spun a new story. So, here’s the thing… The first 70% of this book reminded me a lot of another popular book, but it isn’t nearly as cut and paste as The Housemaid so I’m not going to get into it here. It does seem that Freida is inspired by great twists and plot structures from other books, but I don’t think she fully steals them. In particular, Freida throws in a few more twists in the last 20% of both Housemaid books that delivers a few more blindsides for those who are reading for those.
I liked the set up that Millie thought she was helping save Wendy when in reality, Wendy was setting her up. The man she thought was Douglas wasn’t actually Douglas!!! A jaw-dropper twist (if I hadn’t seen it before, but let’s not go there). I was pretty confident that Wendy was setting her up, but I didn’t suspect that she had been interacting with a different man. Props to you, Freida! This was a fun twist and I liked the execution.
Why is Millie so dumb?
After the reveal that Wendy set Millie up, it was kind of ridiculous that Millie still didn’t believe it. I’ll be honest, I am never sure what to make of Millie. She’s this brilliant murderer (hello… setting Marybeth up to murder Russell and Wendy for her??) who is barely able to walk upright in every other area of her life. Millie!!! Why are you so dumb, girl? I think she is written this way on purpose (I have to imagine she is, at the very least; how could she be this oblivious on accident?). The question that I have, though, is why? Why does Millie need to be a moron?
For the twist to work, Millie did need to have a blind spot when it came to Wendy. That was executed well—though it was obvious to the reader that Wendy was off, it was completely understandable why that wasn’t obvious to Millie. She was trying to do her job and got pulled into this weird couple and their home. She’d just lost a job because she got overly close to a family. Millie’s most core trait that drives these books are that she’s desperate. She can’t pass a background check so she’s stuck working for these completely strange, rich couples with messed-up marriages.
What didn’t work for me was that Millie continued to not understand what was happening when the police hauled her in to the station and told her all of the things Wendy did to set her up. Millie!!! You sweet, pretty dummy. In fact, Enzo had to explain it to her, and he’s not exactly the sharpest crayon in the box either. How have these two managed to set up a scheme to take down rich, powerful men? How do they even walk upright? That last point was too far, but you hopefully understand my point.
What did I think of the ending?
The final scene was a banger. I loved it! This is the scene where we find out that Millie set Marybeth up to murder Russell and Wendy for her. Brilliant! Where was this devious, intelligent little minx during the rest of the book? Perhaps Millie is the type of person who is only capable of using her brain when she’s doing something morally corrupt. If so, I kind of love that. We are led to believe that Marybeth poisoned Russell and Wendy with Douglas’s medication.
What a fun twist to learn that Brock took the exact same medication and had left it at Millie’s apartment before dumping her! I guess Brock didn’t turn out to be entirely useless after all. One extra juicy tidbit was that Wendy could have avoided all of this if she had used Douglas’s own medicine to kill him. The police probably wouldn’t have even realized it’s murder—they would have thought it was a dosing issue. It’s funny how things work out, right?
Final Thoughts
The best thing I can say about Freida McFadden (and I mean this) is that she writes thrillers that are accessible to people with a wide range of reading skills and she writes books that are easy to read. They don’t overly tax your brain, they are comfortably at a 9th grade reading level, and there are plenty of twists and turns, plus a good blindside or two. There’s a reason she’s one of the most talked about thriller authors currently—her books have mass appeal.
I like a lot more character development than we got in this book and in the first book in the trilogy. Character development is not Freida’s thing, and that’s ok. There are so many readers who prefer plot-driven thrillers over character-driven thrillers. One challenge I find is that I don’t like any of the characters, but they also aren’t unlikable in an interesting way. Millie is too dumb, Wendy is one-dimensional (after the reveal) and is also fairly dumb, and Nina wasn’t really likable either, though at least she wasn’t stupid. Wendy’s turn toward moron bothered me a lot, because she had done so much to set everything up. When we saw her true character, I felt disappointed. I would love a deliciously hateful villain, but I found her to be oblivious, unintelligent, and selfish. Not a good combination!
Enzo is an absolutely atrocious character, despite being the most likable. He is simultaneously the only truly redeeming character in the books so far, but he is also somehow even more dumb than Millie. He’s written like a muscle man without two brain cells to rub together. I thought his and Millie’s relationship made no sense, came out of nowhere, and had no development. When he reemerged into the book I really didn’t know what we were supposed to make of him. He was shoehorned in, when we left with him and Nina being the ones with the deep connection. Ugh!
Overall this book was entertaining, and it’s worth reading for that alone. I thought the first book was better, though there were more original twists in this book. Also the ending of this book was better than the first. I have no clue what to expect from the third book! I felt that The Housemaid clearly set up The Housemaid’s Secret. Here, the set up is more of Enzo and Millie, perhaps with a police detective loosely on her side. I guess we will see how that goes!
