Published January 2026, this is a tonal departure for McFadden — closer to dark comedy and revenge fiction than her usual survival-thriller mode. Debbie Mullen writes a beloved advice column, "Dear Debbie," for a small New England newspaper, offering sympathy and guidance to women writing in about unhappy marriages, disrespect, and quiet domestic despair. But Debbie's own life is unraveling: she's just lost her job after a controversial column, her teenage daughters are behaving strangely, and a tracking app reveals her husband Cooper may be keeping secrets — including, it emerges, an affair with a woman in Debbie's own social circle. Rather than continuing to offer the calm, reasonable advice she's built a career on, Debbie decides to stop being "the bigger person" and begins taking matters into her own hands, escalating from small acts of sabotage (against her ex-employer) to a full campaign of retribution against the people in her life who have wronged her and the women who wrote to her over the years seeking help she couldn't fully give them. The novel is structured around Debbie's advice-column entries interspersed with the main narrative, which grow progressively darker and more revealing of her deteriorating, then hardening, mental state. Critics and reviewers have largely responded to the book as a subversive, "good for her" revenge narrative — praised for a morally consistent antihero whose actions, however extreme, follow a legible internal logic — while some readers noted it asks them to suspend disbelief regarding the practical plausibility of Debbie's schemes.