McFadden's breakout 2022 thriller and the first in what became a bestselling series. Millie Calloway, an ex-convict struggling to rebuild her life, takes a live-in housekeeper position with the wealthy Winchester family — Nina, a volatile and unpredictable mother, and Andrew, her charming husband — hoping the job offers a fresh start. From the outset, Nina's behavior toward Millie is erratic and cruel, oscillating between manipulation, hostility, and moments of apparent vulnerability, while Andrew presents himself as the sympathetic, reasonable one caught between his difficult wife and the household help. Millie, isolated and financially trapped (with nowhere else to go and a criminal record limiting her options), is drawn into the family's dysfunction, including growing romantic tension with Andrew. The novel is told in shifting first-person perspectives that gradually destabilize the reader's assumptions about who is the victim and who is the manipulator in the household — McFadden's signature move, deployed here to maximum effect, is a structural reveal partway through that recontextualizes everything readers thought they understood about Nina and Andrew's marriage and Millie's role in it. The back half of the book shifts into a more overt survival-thriller mode as the true nature of the Winchester household's threat becomes clear. The book's massive commercial success (spawning two sequels, The Housemaid's Secret and The Housemaid Is Watching) established McFadden as one of the genre's defining voices and cemented "domestic thriller with a structural mid-book twist" as her signature format.