The Housemaid is Watching (spoilers and ending explained) | Freida McFadden

We have reached the conclusion of Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid series, and this was not how I expected the book to end. If you’ve followed any of my other reviews on the series, you’ll know that I liked The Housemaid (though I took small issue with the overlap with another popular book, I felt the last 20% redeemed it), and I really liked The Housemaid’s Secrets, which branched off from the source material and delivered a banger of a second half. Now I’ve read the third book that came out this year, The Housemaid is Watching. Did I think it was good? Better than the others? Let’s get into it!

What is The Housemaid is Watching about?

Our favorite murder-y housemaid Millie returns as the lead again in the third book. This book is set about fifteen years after the events of The Housemaid’s Secret. Millie and Enzo are married and have two children, 11-year-old Ada and 9-year-old Nico. They’ve just bought a house on Long Island that they can barely afford, but they finally can move out of a tiny apartment in New York City and have stairs, a yard, and space for the first time. Millie isn’t a housemaid anymore, she’s a social worker and Enzo is a landscaper.

Suzette Lowell across the street is beautiful, wealthy, and honestly awful. She flirts with Enzo brazenly and puts Millie down. Her husband Jonathan isn’t exactly a prize catch, but I guess he’s rich so there’s that. Next door to Suzette is Janice, an older woman who is cranky and judgmental and has a son the same age as Nico. Suzette invites Millie and the family over for an awkward dinner, and she has her own housemaid Marta who Millie has noticed watching her. Enzo hires her to clean their house as well.

The first 60% of the book is largely taken up by Millie being classic Millie. Somewhat stupid, naïve, and moderately unpleasant. Millie ends every single chapter no matter what mundane inconvenience or barely suspicious thing happens saying that she thinks it was a bad idea to move to the suburbs. We get it, Millie. We get it! Suzette is a snob, Janice is mean, and Marta is stealing from you so you fire her. Enzo spends too much time across the street with Suzette, and also you have just realized he is a better liar than you thought. The kids are unhappy. This isn’t the ideal suburban life with fun neighbors you hoped for, Millie. We all feel for you, truly. 

The first part is truly a slog, in my opinion. Millie is not interesting, I kept missing the old Millie who was dumb, but was also reacting to the crazy people in the houses she cleaned and plotting murders. This Millie is dumb and boring. A crime! But then something does happen… Millie is across the street at Suzette’s looking for Enzo when she discovers Jonathan (Suzette’s husband) dead on the floor with his throat slit. What?!?

Who killed Jonathan Lowell?

It’s not Millie, so you can go ahead and set aside any hopes you had for our merry murderess to make a grand return. But it quickly appears it might be Enzo. He is washing blood off his hand into the sink and his shirt is covered in it. He says it wasn’t him but Millie is suspicious (of course she is, she’s wondered if he’s a liar almost every chapter so far). It isn’t long before the police narrow in on Enzo as the suspect after Janice says she saw him at the house during the time of the murder. Millie begins to get worried and calls her old cop friend Benny who gets her an attorney. And it’s none other than Cecelia from the first book, grown up now and graduated from law school. Her father is still very dead (Millie killed him), but Cecelia is grateful to Millie and wants to help.

It’s not long before the police search the house and find something—the murder weapon. Maybe Enzo really did do this? Cecelia comes to warn them that Enzo is about to be arrested, and when Enzo finds out they found the knife that murdered Jonathan, he changes his tune and suddenly confesses to Millie and Cecelia that it actually was him who murdered Jonathan. What?!? This seems like an open-and-shut case, right? Enzo says it was him, he had the murder weapon, Millie even saw him covered in blood…

Now the book is at 75% and despite the drama with Enzo and the murder weapon, it was honestly still a little bit boring. Here’s where things seem as though they will pick up (but don’t). After Enzo is arrested Millie finds Ada upstairs sobbing. She goes to comfort her and Ada confesses… it actually wasn’t Enzo who murdered Jonathan, it was Ada. What?!?

How does The Housemaid is Watching end?

In McFadden’s signature style in this series, the book flashes back to Ada narrating a “how to kill your creepy neighbor” segment. Ada doesn’t like her new school. A boy won’t leave her alone. Nico is withdrawing, and she misses him. The boy grabs her wrist one day when she’s waiting for Enzo to pick her up and he screams at him. The boy leaves her alone. Nico finally admits what has been going on, and it turns out that he hasn’t been doing chores at the Lowell’s like they thought. Jonathan was making Nico go in a hidden room beneath the stairs and play with toys while he watched him from a camera in the ceiling. Gross. Creepy. Weird. Pedo-adjacent somehow.

Ada swears not to tell their parents, but goes across the street to investigate. She finds the room just as Nico described, and notices a bed in the room and finds dried blood on the sheets. Jonathan walks in behind her, trapping them in the room. He can’t let her leave now that she found the bloody sheets. One might wonder why this man would leave bloody sheets in the room at all, when he could have just gotten rid of them? No one in these books is ever intelligent though, so let’s just set that aside. Ada panics and stabs him with a pocket knife that Enzo gave her and runs from the house. At home, she confesses to Nico and they clean the knife and hide it. Enzo realized when they found the murder weapon that Ada was the killer, and that is why he confessed.

Eventually Ada tells Millie everything, and Millie calls Cecelia to figure out what to do. Millie can’t figure out how her 11-year-old was able to slit a grown man’s throat, since that the cause of death. But she figures she must have, despite being much shorter than this grown man. Millie… be so for real right now. Benny comes by to say that Suzette’s fingerprints were found in the secret room and that the blood in the room belonged to a missing child from the town. Gross!

Millie threatens to expose Suzette for complicity in the murder of the child if she doesn’t confess to murdering Jonathan in self-defense. Stuck with two bad choices, Suzette does it and Enzo goes free. Meanwhile Ada has another boy bothering her at school and she threatens to castrate him. Oh Ada… like mother, like daughter, as they say.

In the epilogue, Marta makes a come back (who???). Marta is the other housemaid, the one who has been out of the book for over 50% of it. It turns out Enzo helped her escape a bad marriage. She needed money, though, and went to take jewelry from Suzette’s when she saw Jonathan stumbling out of the hidden room ranting about Ada. He sees her with his wife’s jewelry in her hands and lunges at her. She does the only thing she can think and slits his throat. So I guess Suzette wasn’t the murderer after all, it was Martha. So… that’s it. That’s the “big” reveal.

What did I think?

This was not good. I’m not sure what else to say! It wasn’t like some Freida books where I had some issues with the plotting but was entertained… this was boring. This story wasn’t worthy of Millie in my opinion, our iconic, dumb, murdering queen. Millie has always been a somewhat dim character. She has a knack for stumbling into the middle of toxic relationships and becoming a pawn, before flipping the tables and suddenly being a beautiful—if mornonic—angel of vengeance. We love that for her! This Millie is something else. Unidimensional, she spends most of the book telling us after every small thing that they shouldn’t have moved to the suburbs. Because she doesn’t like her neighbors? Millie didn’t even speak to her neighbors in her previous neighborhoods. Enzo has always been one-dimensional and continued to be.

Suzette presented as a fairly classic “rich, white woman” in Freida’s books. In this case, though, she never reveals another more calculated side. I personally think a better ending would have been Suzette doing the murder and framing Milile but it blowing back on Enzo. Janice never amounted to anything of worth at all as a character. It seemed she should have had conclusion to her storyline but she never did. Marta was so removed from the plot that when the reveal happened in the epilogue, I struggled to remember who she was. She needed to have more presence than she did. Ada was intended to be a future-Millie, I think. But Millie as a murderer and Ada are quite different. Millie had intention, and she plotted her murders. Ada just happened to be forced into a murder, so I didn’t think this worked.

As I often find with Freida books, there were some notable sloppy plot points that detracted from the overall story. Usually Freida makes up for this with a few banger twists at the end, but she didn’t do that here. Nothing was really a surprise, besides the reappearance of Marta at the end. But that was only a surprise because I forgot who she was. In the book, Freida actually notes that “the third in a series is never good” so perhaps she knew? Or she thought that would be funny but it landed flat in it’s stark truth. This was in fact not good, Freida. It was actually a rare quality for her—boring. I’ve liked and disliked some of her books, but this is the first that I’d ever call boring. That’s not her style! My theory is that she wanted to find a way to close out the series and so she had an idea of what she wanted that conclusion to be—passing the baton from Millie to Ada—but failed to come up with a good story to lock that in. A bold and exciting move would have been to take Millie out at the end here. Her murderous streak is done, but perhaps Ada’s is just beginning.

I’d still say this is worth a read if you’ve liked the rest of the series. How could you not want to see it through? Go in expecting it to be quite different from the prior two. Not many twists at all and no blindsides in sight, but it still has some nostalgia. Probably my favorite tidbit was that the incomparable Nina from the first book made a peripheral return as a date that Benny was going on, set up by Nina’s daughter Cecelia. That’s kind of adorable and I liked that we weren’t hit over the head with Nina’s return. It was just enough to give a little wink to book one.

Was this good? No. But it wasn’t awful. It’s readable and as always, short. Hopefully some fans will still love it.

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