Books Like The Housemaid: 9 Thrillers Where Perfect Is a Performance

Freida McFadden is not a real name. For years the author of The Housemaid appeared in public in a wig and glasses while the internet argued about whether she existed at all, or was secretly three men. In April 2026 she ended it. According to The Guardian, her name is Sara Cohen, she is 45, she lives in Boston with her husband and two children, and she is a doctor who treats brain disorders. She kept the pen name to protect the day job: “My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was [ready to] step back from my doctor job, so it wouldn’t be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job.” Her colleagues worked it out anyway. They kept her secret.

The wig is my favorite part, because it was never a disguise. According to The Guardian, she wears the glasses for real and wears the wig because she has “no idea how to style my hair.” The same piece reports that she has published 27 novels since 2013, still picks up occasional hospital shifts, and did all of it while raising two children and watching The Housemaid become a film that grossed almost $400 million. I genuinely do not know how she does it.

How I Picked These Books

I write domestic thrillers, so I read them the way a carpenter looks at furniture. Three things had to be true before a book made this list:

1. You have to feel like you do not belong there: the woman at the center walks into a world that is not hers and never stops being aware of it, which keeps you braced for the whole book.
2. The perfection has to be somebody’s job: the clean house and the calm voice are being maintained on purpose, by a named person with a reason, so there is somebody specific to watch when it stops working.
3. The scariest person has to be the polite one: nobody in a mask, nobody in the basement, just somebody being extremely nice to you while you work out what is wrong.

Why Is Everyone Talking About The Housemaid Again?

According to Deadline, The Housemaid’s Secret opens December 17, 2027, with Sydney Sweeney returning as Millie and Kirsten Dunst joining the cast. Michele Morrone is back as Enzo, Paul Feig is directing again, and Rebecca Sonnenshine, who adapted the first book, returns to adapt the second. Production starts later this year, and Deadline reports a plan for more Housemaid movies after this one.

I am so excited about this. Casting Dunst opposite Sweeney is the part I keep thinking about.

Which brings up the thing worth knowing before you go hunting for readalikes: the first book and the first movie end differently, and I think the reason is craft. I wrote a full Housemaid book vs movie breakdown about it. The short version, as I put it there:

As a thriller writer, I understand WHY the book needed a different ending. Most readers only get through the first three chapters before deciding whether to keep reading.

The book’s ending is doing a job for the book’s opening, and my read is that a film never has to hold a browsing reader at page three, which freed Feig to take the version that plays in a theater. The nine below are all built on the house.

The 9 Best Books Like The Housemaid

Nine psychological thrillers like The Housemaid, roughly in order of how close they sit to the original premise.

1. The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden (2023)

Millie has a new job cleaning a penthouse for Douglas Garrick and his wife. According to Freida McFadden’s book page, the single rule is that Millie may never go into the guest bedroom, where Douglas says his very ill wife is resting. She has still never met Mrs. Garrick or seen inside that room. It won the 2023 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Mystery & Thriller.

This is the one most people mean when they ask for another Housemaid, on the straightforward grounds that it is the next one. Same narrator, same job, same locked room. What changes is Millie. She already knows exactly what she is capable of by this point, so the question the first book asked about her is settled before this one opens.

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2. Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest (2025)

Audrey and McKinley have grown apart over the years, and Audrey has watched her wild friend, the one who used to drink way too much tequila, become one of the most famous tradwife influencers. When their mutual friend Jessica signs up for McKinley’s Perfect Modern Wife bootcamp and then disappears, Audrey goes out to the wellness retreat to work out what happened to her. Once she is there, nobody will let her see Jessica until the retreat is over.

What inspired me to write Perfect Modern Wife was finding myself having the same conversation over and over again: a lot of my friends were out-earning their male partners but still expected to do all the cooking and cleaning when they came home exhausted from work. And this is becoming even more common. According to a King’s College London study, one out of three Gen Z men agree a wife should always obey her husband, compared to only one out of ten Baby Boomer men. That means Gen Z men are twice as likely as Boomers to hold traditional views about decision-making in marriage, and 24% believe women shouldn’t appear “too independent or self-sufficient.” While all this was going on, my high school homecoming king married one of the most famous farm trad wife influencers.

Audrey expects organic smoothies and sunset selfies. Instead, she finds McKinley crawling across the kitchen floor at 3 AM, hands raw and bleeding, chanting about being the perfect modern wife. As Laura Donovan, Business Insider writer and author, summed it up, this 53-page survive-the-night psychological thriller novella is: “Don’t Worry Darling meets Blink Twice meets… what could be the not so far off future under our current administration.”

It has been optioned by horror writer/director Joanna Tsanis to turn into a movie. And if you want to read it, lucky for you, I’m currently giving away this book like The Housemaid for free. Get it before this promo ends! Full disclosure: I wrote this one.

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3. The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani (2018)

According to Penguin Random House, Myriam goes back to work as a lawyer and she and her husband go looking for the perfect nanny. They find Louise, “a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint,” and, in the publisher’s words, “the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another.” According to Penguin Random House, she won the Prix Goncourt for the French original and became “the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize.”

Slimani is interested in the arrangement itself: a woman is paid to love other people’s children in a home where she will never be family. The book runs 240 pages and spends them on the daily texture of that job. Myriam and her husband are not written as villains. My read is that most books like The Perfect Nanny go easier on the parents than Slimani does.

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4. The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware (2019)

Rowan Caine takes a live-in nanny post with what the publisher calls “a staggeringly generous salary” and arrives at Heatherbrae House, which Kirkus places in the remote Scottish moors. According to Simon & Schuster, the house watches her through its own cameras, wakes the household with booming music, and kills the lights at the worst possible moments. She tells the whole story in a letter to her lawyer, written from prison while she waits to stand trial for murder.

Of the books here that are not McFadden’s own, this is the purest structural match. A hired woman moves into an enormous house belonging to people she does not know, and gives you her version of events while you decide how much of it to believe. The smart-home layer is what makes it Ware’s own. Heatherbrae never needs to lock Rowan in anywhere, because it is already logging her. Ware spends books like The Turn of the Key on what it does to a person to be watched by a house all day.

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5. The Maid’s Diary by Loreth Anne White (2023)

According to Loreth Anne White’s book page, Kit Darling is “a maid with a snooping problem” who reads her wealthy clients’ lives while she cleans around them, until she sees something at a brand-new client’s house that she cannot unsee. Afterwards, in White’s words, “the homeowners are gone. And their maid is missing.” It won the 2024 Peter Robinson Award for Best Crime Novel.

Kit is the reason this book is here. White gives her a snooping habit she is completely aware of and has quietly built a practice around, so the invisibility that gets done to Millie is something Kit picked up and put to work. White makes the snooping the subject of the novel and keeps the reader on Kit’s side while she does it.

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6. The Maid by Nita Prose (2022)

Molly Gray cleans rooms at the Regency Grand and loves the work. According to Penguin Random House, “Molly’s orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed,” after which her unusual manner makes her the police’s lead suspect. According to Penguin Random House, it was a #1 New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America Book Club pick, and it is “in development as a major motion picture.”

Molly walks into Charles Black’s suite the way Millie walks into her employers’ house: into a wealthy stranger’s private arrangement, at a moment when nobody in it wants a witness. Prose makes Molly’s invisibility the source of the danger: the police read her manner as guilt.

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7. The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell (2019)

According to Kirkus, Libby Jones learns at twenty-five that she has inherited a large London house held in trust by her birth parents, who died there in an apparent suicide pact with an unidentified man when she was ten months old. In the past-tense chapters her brother Henry Lamb remembers the years when the family lost their wealth and were “manipulated into letting friends move into their home,” including the controlling and charismatic David Thomsen, who moved his own wife and two children into the rooms upstairs.

This is the one that rhymes hardest with my own book, which I am telling you up front. A charismatic person moves into a wealthy household, rewrites how everyone in it is allowed to live, and the adults keep agreeing to it long after any of them could explain why. Jewell moves back and forth between that past and Libby’s present until the two meet.

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8. The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins (2021)

According to Publishers Weekly, a “penniless young woman calling herself Jane” starts walking dogs in Thornfield Estates, a gated community in Birmingham, Alabama, and meets a recent widower named Eddie Rochester, whose wealthy wife Bea Mason went missing and was presumed drowned in a boating accident.

The names give the game away, so here it is outright: Hawkins has moved Jane Eyre into a gated community in Alabama. Jane is in and out of Thornfield Estates every day on other people’s business, and nobody there mistakes her for a resident. Hawkins is very good on the anger that produces. If you want more in that register, I have a list of atmospheric gothic thrillers built around it.

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9. The Girl Before by J.P. Delaney (2016)

One Folgate Street is an architectural masterpiece with conditions attached. According to Penguin Random House, the architect who designed it “retains full control: no books, no throw pillows, no photos or clutter or personal effects of any kind.” Jane moves in and then learns about the untimely death of the previous tenant, a woman similar to her in age and appearance. According to Wikipedia, it ran as a four-part BBC One and HBO Max series in December 2021 with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and David Oyelowo.

Jane does not belong in One Folgate Street and the house never lets her forget it. She lives inside something beautiful belonging to an architect who has written down how she may exist in it, and his rules arrive dressed as good design. Staying is conditional on keeping it immaculate.

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What to Read Next

If you want a wider net than this one premise, my list of books like Freida McFadden goes wider on the same itch.

FAQ: Books Like The Housemaid

What Are the Best Books Like The Housemaid?

If you are working out what to read after The Housemaid, start with The Housemaid’s Secret, since it continues Millie’s story directly. After that, the closest matches by premise are The Perfect Nanny, The Turn of the Key, The Maid’s Diary and The Maid, all of which put a woman to work cleaning up after wealthy strangers. For the cult-adjacent version, my own books like The Housemaid pick is Perfect Modern Wife, which one Goodreads reviewer, Sheri, summed up as “Twists, twists, and more twists!”

Do I Need to Read The Housemaid Before The Housemaid’s Secret?

Yes. If you are working through the series, start at the beginning. The Housemaid sets up who Millie is and what she has already done, and the sequel assumes you know both. Reading them out of order spoils the first book’s central turn and flattens the second one, because the whole tension of The Housemaid’s Secret comes from what you already know she is willing to do. McFadden has kept going after that: there is a short story, The Housemaid’s Wedding, and a third novel, The Housemaid Is Watching. Once you have run out of Millie, the nine above are the books like The Housemaid series I would hand you next.

Is There a The Housemaid’s Secret Movie?

There will be. According to Deadline, Lionsgate has set The Housemaid’s Secret for December 17, 2027, with Sydney Sweeney returning as Millie, Kirsten Dunst joining, Michele Morrone back as Enzo, and Paul Feig directing. Rebecca Sonnenshine, who wrote the first adaptation, is adapting the sequel, and Deadline reports a plan for more Housemaid movies beyond this one.

Are Books Similar to The Housemaid Always Domestic Thrillers?

Mostly, though the label is looser than it looks. Readers arrive at this premise from several directions: some search books similar to The Housemaid, some search books like The Housemaid series after finishing Millie’s story, and plenty come in sideways through a single title, searching books like The Perfect Nanny or books like The Turn of the Key. They all want the same shape, and psychological thrillers like The Housemaid are where they end up. The nine here sit across domestic suspense, literary fiction and one cosy-adjacent mystery, and they are filed on different shelves and share one setting.

What to Read After The Housemaid If You Want Something Shorter?

The Perfect Nanny runs 240 pages, which makes it one of the quicker reads here. If you want something you can finish tonight, my short thriller books list collects novellas and very short novels in this same register.

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