Review: The Housemaid's Secret (The Housemaid, #2) by Freida McFadden

                                                                    

Print Length: 311 pages

Publisher: Bookouture (February 20, 2023)

From Goodreads.com:  It's hard to find an employer who doesn't ask too many questions about my past. So I thank my lucky stars that the Garricks miraculously give me a job, cleaning their stunning penthouse with views across the city and preparing fancy meals in their shiny kitchen. I can work here for a while, stay quiet until I get what I want. It's almost perfect. But I still haven't met Mrs Garrick, or seen inside the guest bedroom. I'm sure I hear her crying. I notice spots of blood around the neck of her white nightgowns when I'm doing laundry. And one day I can't help but knock on the door. When it gently swings open, what I see inside changes everything...

That's when I make a promise. After all, I've done this before. I can protect Mrs. Garrick while keeping my own secrets locked up safe. Douglas Garrick has done wrong. He is going to pay. It's simply a question of how far I'm willing to go...

                                                         *******************

My Rating: 1 star out of 5

It's been over a year since I read the first book in this series, and after watching the movie adaptation (look, it was streaming and I was bored, okay?), I decided to give the second book a chance to see if I enjoyed it any more than the first.

Sadly... I didn't.

The reasons are a little different this time around, but somehow they all seem to circle back to one thing: Millie. Because the more I read about her, the more convinced I become that she's just not a strong enough character to carry an entire series.

To begin with, I simply don't understand her.

By this point, she's presumably spent quite a while working for wealthy families since the events of The Housemaid, a fair assumption considering she's employed by yet another affluent household when this book opens. Yet somehow she's still living in a dangerous neighborhood and worrying that she doesn't even have enough money in her bank account to cover a single month's rent if she loses her job.

Where did all of her money go?

Yes, I know she's attending college to earn a degree in social work, but even taking tuition into account, I struggled to believe she'd be quite so financially desperate after everything she's supposedly been doing between books.

Then there's the fact that this version of Millie feels like a watered-down imitation of the woman we met in the first novel. She somehow manages to be less interesting while also making significantly worse decisions.

I understand that her whole purpose as a character is helping women escape abusive situations, but how does someone with her own life experiences, particularly someone who has served time in prison, remain so completely oblivious when people are clearly manipulating her?

And I'm not even talking about the book's main event.

Although... maybe this is just where my cynical side differs from Millie's, but there is absolutely no universe in which I'm grabbing hold of a gun that someone else is already holding.

Hello, fingerprints.

To make matters worse, Millie also wins my completely unofficial award for Worst Girlfriend Ever.

She's apparently been dating Brock long enough that her inner monologue spends pages explaining how absolutely perfect he is. Yet she repeatedly blows off their plans, feeds him one flimsy excuse after another, which he somehow accepts without asking any questions because apparently that's what perfect boyfriends do, and continually tells herself she needs to tell him about her past.

She even tells him they need to have "a serious conversation". Repeatedly. 

And then proceeds to prioritize literally everything and everyone else instead.

At a certain point, I actually found myself rooting for Millie to get arrested because almost nothing happening around her made any logical sense. Not the way she treated Brock. Not her ex-boyfriend suddenly reappearing. And certainly not the revelation surrounding her former employer. To begin with, when the news first reports on his death, and she is first questioned she finds out that he was shot in the chest... despite the fact that she knew full well she'd shot him in the back. Or at least she should have known that considering she shot him when while he was in the middle of choking his wife to death. But apparently the author decided continuity wasn't terribly important in that moment.

Then there was that point-of-view switch.

Honestly, I could have done without it entirely because by then we'd already figured out exactly what had happened. Instead of adding suspense or providing some shocking new perspective, it simply confirmed information the reader already knew.

The only thing it really accomplished was proving that this new point-of-view character was somehow even worse than I'd imagined.

And if you ask me, she got off far too easily.

That said... despite everything I've just said, I already have both the novella and the third book sitting on my Kindle. I'm a bit of a masochist that way. Once I start a series, I generally have to see it through... even if it insists on making me question my life choices along the way.