Harvard doctor turned thriller queen, McFadden dominates

Have you read the one about the doctor with a double life writing globally bestselling thrillers? The twists of Freida McFadden’s career are not unlike the jaw-dropping plots of the novels she writes, novels that have crowned her the new queen of the literary thriller. The fact that McFadden is a pseudonym only adds to the intrigue. “I have no interest in being famous,” she told The Times this week.

McFadden, bespectacled with an angular bob, accounts for four of the five bestselling novels on Amazon, with four more of her titles listed in the retailer’s top 50. Her grip on the ebook world is equally vice-like — she wrote no fewer than 10 of Kindle’s 50 most popular titles. Exact figures are hard to come by, but she is reckoned to have sold more than 36 million copies worldwide. It helps that she’s so prolific, having penned a total of 27 novels in the past 13 years, including the newly published Dear Debbie, a wild ride that chronicles one woman’s transformation from a kind, caring agony aunt columnist into a vengeful mastermind.

The Freida McFadden supremacy is not a new development in the book world — household names like John Grisham and James Patterson have found themselves pipped to the post in recent years by the author — but the hugely successful adaptation of her 2022 novel The Housemaid has turned up the spotlight significantly. And beyond the star power helping to propel its popularity (Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried), it’s easy to see why the film raked in $300m (£218m).

The Housemaid is a textbook example of McFadden’s formula: Millie is broke and living in her car when she is offered a job as a live-in maid for a picture-perfect family in wealthy Long Island, only to discover some cracks in the facade. The book is dark, twisted and propulsive — a reading experience akin to running down a scary hallway with an ominous door at the end. You just have to know what’s on the other side, and so you keep turning the pages. Only this is a Freida McFadden novel, so along the way you start to notice that the blood spatter on the walls is fake, and the windows are made of plastic.

Realism is not McFadden’s strong suit, but nor is it her goal. Rug-pulls, the long con, jumping the shark — whatever you want to call it, her books indulge in a certain kind of narrative bait-and-switch. Detractors will call it a cheap trick. Her millions of readers (McFans, as they call themselves) certainly don’t mind. Hers are books with titillating subtitles like “If you thought she was gone... think again” and “This perfect home has one rule. Don’t look behind closed doors...” Even the brazen use of ellipses should give you some indication as to what to expect inside. Take the propulsive darkness of Gone Girl, the prolific output of Colleen Hoover, and the addictive twists of Harlan Coben, and you have something close to Freida McFadden.

Thematically, The Housemaid, her biggest book, is a different bag to her 2013 debut. The Devil Wears Scrubs is a darkly funny account of a newly minted doctor in the midst of a hellish internship, written when McFadden herself was a newly minted doctor in the midst of a hellish internship. The genre was different, but all the ingredients of the author’s later success were there: a morally dubious man, life-or-death stakes, and a flawed female protagonist getting by on her wits. McFadden wrote the novel for fun, but when it unexpectedly shifted a few thousand copies, she realised she was onto something — recognising an appetite for what she has called “medical-ish women’s fiction”.

McFadden self-published another five books in quick succession, leaning more heavily into the psychological thriller genre. Her second novel, Suicide Med, followed a young woman who enrols at a med school that’s plagued by a mysterious string of suicides. It also featured a character with an eyeball on his bum, a congenital defect that turns out to be sentient and the only thing stopping him from becoming a homicidal maniac. Yes, really.

She cut out that queasy subplot before the novel was reissued years later as Dead Med, but again, that sense of ludicrousness, improbability pushed to the point of audacity, remains intrinsic to her writing – and her success. Her characters behave in ways no real person would ever behave, reacting to events that unfold in unexpected and unbelievable ways. “Butt eyes” may no longer figure, but McFadden’s books traffic in the unexpected.

She soon learnt, though, that even her audience had a limit as to what they would take. Her big break arrived in 2019 with the release of The Ex — a story of a woman tormented by her boyfriend’s psychotic ex-girlfriend that culminated in a mind-melting twist that even McFadden’s own mother couldn’t wrap her head around. McFadden listened to her readers and her mother, rewrote the conclusion, and republished the book.

Inspired by the “original domestic thrillers” Rebecca and Jane Eyre, McFadden wrote The Housemaid also in 2019. She almost didn’t publish, out of fear that Millie’s story was too dark for her readership, and was only swayed after an ebook publisher offered to publish and promote a book of hers on their mailing list.