The Tenant | Freida McFadden (spoilers and ending explained)

This review covers all of the juciy spoilers and a summary of The Tenant – Freida McFadden’s latest thriller. If you want to see a review with no spoilers, head over to the main review. Otherwise let’s get into it!

We’ve all had a bad roommate experience, right? (If you haven’t had that experience, consider that you were probably the bad roommate…) They escalate quickly! In the case of this book, it’s a tenant situation so you’d think the landlord has the power, right? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Let’s talk about what really went down in Freida McFadden’s latest thriller, The Tenant.

What is The Tenant about?

Blake Porter had it all—a new VP position at work, the love of his life Krista, and their dream brownstone in Manhattan. When you’re on top, the only place to go is down, Blake soon learns. He’s accused of betraying his boss and fired. Is it a smear campaign or a misunderstanding? We’ll get to that. Blake struggles to find work, and the more rejection he gets, the more depressed he becomes. Finally, his fiancé Krista suggests that they take on a tenant to help them pay the mortgage on their brownstone. Now, Blake is too much of a man to allow this at first. He wants to give Krista the world (which is frankly a bit nauseating the way he infantilizes her, but again, we’ll get to that) but instead he’s barely holding their lives together.

Whitney Cross seems like the perfect tenant. She’s nice, keeps to herself, and incredibly hot (this part might only be perfect for Blake). It doesn’t take long for things to go awry and Whitney to be a terrible roommate. She eats all of his cereal, uses all of his soap (these might seem like petty things to complain about unless you’ve ever been in that situation with a roommate and experienced the rage of coming home to find your food missing), and leaves a bag of rotting apples in a cabinet causing a fruit fly infestation. Blake’s mistake was confronting her at her waitressing job over the missing items. It’s hard for him to take the high ground after that, especially when he dumps the rotting, maggot-filled bag of apples onto her bed. Oh Blake…

How does it unravel?

You know how Freida McFadden loves to add in a super bizarre detail that she hammers into the reader by mentioning it repeatedly? (I’m looking at you, Tuna) Well in this book that detail is Blake and Krista’s goldfish. This is how they are testing out how they will co-parent a child together, so this goldfish is inexplicably important to them. (I know what you’re thinking, shouldn’t they have gotten a dog or a cat? No. That was too much responsibility. This is how you know they are unserious) After Blake dumps the maggots in Whitney’s bed, the goldfish is found dead in its tank which smells strongly of bleach… Blake accuses Whitney which was a fatal mistake, because Whitney acts outraged and then suggests to Krista that they hold a funeral and bury the fish (lol) and Blake really looks like a jerk. Afterwards, Krista needs space from Blake and moves out. Not long after, their neighbor winds up dead and the police suspect Blake because of their ongoing fights over the garbage cans. Also, Blake finds a bag with three severed fingers in it under the refrigerator. Yikes!

What is a man to do when he’s lost it all? Search for answers. Blake learns from Whitney’s high school secretary that Whitney has a dark past. She was linked to several accidents involving other students, including the death of her former boyfriend after he cheated on her. Uh oh… Blake finds the address where Whitney’s parents live and rents a car to drive out there. Blake describes to Whitney’s mother everything that has happened since Whitney moved in, and she invites him in.

Who is Whitney Cross?

Mrs. Cross tells Blake that Whitney’s history of ruining others’ lives started at a young age when she pushed her brother off the jungle gym and he broke his arm. She went on to intentionally hurt her mother for years. Whitney’s father had a heart attack just before Whitney disappeared, leaving dozens of wrecked people in her wake. The Crosses didn’t know where she went at first, other than that it was abroad. They knew she had returned when the girl that Whitney’s boyfriend cheated on her with was killed. (This woman waited six years to get revenge! Imagine what she could do if she put that focus and dedication to something that isn’t murder…) Blake happens to see some family photos when Mrs. Cross goes to get them a beverage. He sees an old photo with a man, a woman, and two teenagers from about fifteen years earlier. Whitney looks exactly the same in the photo as she does today. Only, it isn’t the person he knows as Whitney.

The photo of Whitney Cross is actually his ex-fiancée Krista. (This was such a juicy twist, I loved it!)

Was your head spinning at this point? Mine was. I kind of suspected Krista all along, because she was just so sugary sweet and naïve. It didn’t make sense. That said, I certainly didn’t guess that she was the real Whitney Cross! Why would she do this to her fiancee? We learn that Blake cheated on her (uh oh!) one time with a girl at work named Stacie. Now, Stacie is missing. Do those fingers belong to her?? Anyway, Blake reaches into his pocket and finds a suicide note that he definitely did not write. Sounds like he shouldn’t have eaten those cookies Krista gave him…

Why did Krista do this?

The book switches to Krista’s perspective and things continue to stay juicy and twisty through the end of the book. Krista met Whitney when she was working in a diner and discovered Whitney had the exact same name (including her surname) as Krista’s former name. Krista’s friend Elijah helped her get her new identity, but she wonders whether someone else could have taken her old identity when she stopped using it.

Krista recounts the night she discovered Blake had cheated on her and let’s just say this man deserved to have his cheating discovered by this psycho. First, because he shouldn’t have done it (men!). Second, because he didn’t even do the bare minimum to hide it. This man showed up at home with his shirt buttoned incorrectly at 1 AM and smelling of perfume. After he goes to sleep, Krista finds a text from Stacie on his phone confirming the encounter. Blake! You are so dumb! (If only all men that cheated were this dumb, though. You know? That would make it a lot easier for us to dump them)

Krista doesn’t dump him, though. She destroys his life. After ruining his job, Krista finds out who the woman is who took over her real identity and she’s a former PhD student fleeing an abusive situation. Krista gets her evicted from her apartment and makes sure she applies for their available room. Pretty much everything that Blake blamed on Whitney were done by Krista, of course. She killed their neighbor, Mr. Zimmerman, knowing the police would blame Blake. She killed Stacie, the girl Blake had an affair with, and chopped her fingers off. She killed her friend Elijah for helping her secure a new identity (and knowing too much). And for her grand finale, she plans to kill Amanda/Whitney and Blake, staging it to look like a murder-suicide.

How does it end?

Inexplicably, Blake makes the decision (after realizing Krista poisoned him and likely killed Stacie) to call her and tell her he just visited her parents. This is a bizarre decision. Maybe go to the hospital? Krista admits what she did and tells Blake he will die from the poison shortly. He falls to the floor after spotting Whitney crumpled with blood all over her abdomen. Just as he may pass out, he sees Krista fall beside him. Whitney stabbed him. And this man… this simp… tells her he loves her and tries to get Whitney to save her. Blake deserved those poisoned cookies for this, if I’m honest! Grow a spine, Blake.

Anyways flash forward, Blake is out of the hospital. He and Whitney hook up but it’s not a match (I sighed so hard my lungs collapsed because what is wrong with this man??). Blake moves, and we learn that Whitney (real name Amanda) may not be exactly who she pretended… (of course she isn’t…) Amanda/Whitney owed gambling debts to a loan shark. This man happens to be a relative of the boy Krista (real Whitney) killed in high school, so he offers to forgive her debt if she kills Krista. Obviously she does…

What did I think?

Let’s talk about that final scene first. Usually Freida throws in a great little twist right at the end to shock the reader. In this case.. it wasn’t really shocking, though. Krista stabbed Amanda/Whitney so it wasn’t shocking that she stabbed her back. Learning that she was asked to do it previously by the relative of her former boyfriend just didn’t hit the way it should have, because of course she killed Krista. It didn’t even need to be due to the debt in this case because Krista literally just stabbed her to death. This entire ending needed to be adjusted. Either the reader gets the shock of Whitney stabbing Krista to save Blake (ugh) or the reader gets the shock of learning Whitney was tasked with killing Krista. Independently, both work (though the latter is obviously preferable). Together? I found it so flat and dull. Amanda/Whitney had no choice but to kill Krista! I guess you could argue she did it to save Blake, but the reality is that she was bleeding out as well with the woman who stabbed her. Obviously Krista needed to go!

Otherwise, this was much better than the usual Freida book, in my opinion. It had plenty of things I didn’t like, but overall the story was fun. Blake was a simp to beat all simps until the very last chapter, but I didn’t hate it. It starts with him just over the top into Krista, which is cute even though she is so dull. Then imagine learning he cheated and Krista happens to be a total psycho! Fun! I loved this twist. I figured Krista might be the culprit, but that was mostly because that semed like such a Frieda-type-twist. I thought it was so fun, and I will always say Freida excels when it is time to showcase a villainous lead explaining exactly how villainous they are. This is so characteristic of Freida (perhaps my favorite is in this book, but there are countless others!).

Did I enjoy it?? Yes! If you liked this and are new to Freida, I’d recommend trying her standalone thriller The Boyfriend next – it is absolutely the second best of her books (in my opinion). Check it out and let me know your thoughts on The Tenant!