Review: The Housemaid is Watching (The Housemaid, #3) by Freida McFadden

                                                                     

Print Length: 400 pages

Publisher: Sourcebooks (June 11, 2024)

From Goodreads.com:  You must be our new neighbors!” Mrs. Lowell gushes and waves across the picket fence. I clutch my daughter’s hand and smile back: but the second Mrs. Lowell sees my husband a strange expression crosses her face. In that moment I make a promise. We finally have a family home. My past is far, far behind us. And I’ll do anything to keep it that way…

I used to clean other people’s houses—now, I can’t believe this home is actually mine. The charming kitchen, the quiet cul-de-sac, the huge yard where my kids can play. My husband and I saved for years to give our children the life they deserve.

Even though I’m wary of our new neighbor Mrs. Lowell, when she invites us over for dinner it’s our chance to make friends. Her maid opens the door wearing a white apron, her hair in a tight bun. I know exactly what it’s like to be in her shoes. But her cold stare gives me chills…

The Lowells’ maid isn’t the only strange thing on our street. I’m sure I see a shadowy figure watching us. My husband leaves the house late at night. And when I meet a woman who lives across the way, her words chill me to the bone: Be careful of your neighbors.

Did I make a terrible mistake moving my family here?

I thought I’d left my darkest secrets behind. But could this quiet suburban street be the most dangerous place of all?

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My Rating: 1 star out of 5

This was the (I hope) final book in the series and... good lord. By the time I reached the last page, I genuinely couldn't decide whether Millie and Enzo are the two unluckiest people alive or simply incapable of recognizing the giant flashing neon warning signs right in front of them. Honestly, I think it's probably a little bit of both.

To begin with, I finally understand one of the biggest complaints I've seen other readers make about Enzo throughout this series. One minute he's speaking perfectly fluent English, and the next he suddenly isn't. I understand occasionally slipping into broken English to charm your way into (or out of) a situation, but the inconsistency became distracting. It often felt like his speech patterns changed on a whim rather than who Enzo actually was or what the scene required.

I also found it incredibly frustrating that he seemed completely oblivious to his neighbor openly flirting with him. Millie has far more patience than I ever would because... girl, absolutely not. In fact, I'd have put both neighbors in their place long before the story ever got where it did.

Speaking of Millie... where is the woman we met in the first book? Or even the second?

I understand that she's now married with children and naturally she's going to have changed over the years. But somewhere along the way she lost almost everything that made her an interesting protagonist in the first place. She's supposedly been working as a social worker for several years and even tells us she began her career working with children. Yet when her own son suddenly starts displaying textbook signs of having experienced some kind of trauma, she doesn't recognize it? She doesn't ask questions? She doesn't even seem to consider that something may have happened to him.

Instead... she Googles how to tell if your child is a psychopath. Sure. That seems like the logical conclusion for an experienced social worker to jump to.

I was equally baffled by the whole high blood pressure subplot. It never really served as an actual plot device or added meaningful tension to the story. Instead, it mostly seemed to exist as a convenient excuse for Enzo to behave in ways that felt completely out of character for him. There were several moments where I found myself wondering who this man was because he certainly didn't resemble the Enzo we'd spent the previous books getting to know.

As for Ada and Nico... I could write an entire section about them and how they bear almost no resemblance to any eleven- or nine-year-old I've ever encountered. But I'd only end up irritating myself all over again.

Then we come to one of my biggest frustrations with this author in general. Once again, they said the quiet part out loud. The supposed "twist" was so obvious that Helen Keller probably could have seen it coming.

Something terrible happens, and we're explicitly told that one character reacts exactly as instructed: they stab someone in the abdomen and twist the knife. Yet when the body is eventually discovered, the cause of death is a slit throat.

And... no one finds this odd?

Not Millie when she hears the details about the original stab wound (as she was the one to find the body), not the investigators, not even the medical examiner, who would almost certainly have been able to determine that the stab wound and the fatal throat injury were inflicted by two completely different weapons. Come on. That's basic forensic investigation.

Then again, realism has never exactly been this author's strongest suit.

All that said, I'm relieved to finally have reached the end of this series. Were there entertaining moments along the way? Sure. But after three novels and a novella, I'm more than ready to close the book on Millie and Enzo's adventures.