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Series: The Housemaid #1
Publication date: April 26th, 2022
Pages: 329
Spice: N/A
Synopsis:
"Welcome to the family," Nina Winchester says as I shake her elegant, manicured hand. I smile politely, gazing around the marble hallway. Working here is my last chance to start fresh. I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I'll soon learn that the Winchesters' secrets are far more dangerous than my own...
Every day I clean the Winchesters' beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.
I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew's handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it's hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina's life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.
I only try on one of Nina's pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it's like. But she soon finds out... and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it's far too late.
But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don't know who I really am.
They don't know what I'm capable of...
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Review:
Millie has no idea what she is getting herself into when she walks through the front door of the Winchester home and into her new role as the housemaid. All she saw when she first entered was the prestige and the vibrancy that having an abundance of money garnered for those who possessed it. When she started work she thought perhaps Mrs. Winchester was a little eccentric. She would lose things and blame Millie, she would send her on wild goose chases only to claim she never asked her to do such things, and she would intentionally frustrate Millie to the point of wondering how sane her employer actually was. Add in a little girl who looked like a possessed doll most of the time and seemed to have jumped on the bandwagon of making Millie's life miserable and Millie was at her wits end. If it weren't for her ex-con status and the handsome and patient Mr. Winchester she would have quit ages ago. But appearances are not always what they seem. Sometimes the crazy are perfectly sane and evil can be found in the most unlikely of places.
The Housemaid took me on a rollercoaster of emotion. I was annotating my physical copy of the book as I reading and I nearly ran out of the tabs for "Triggered/Angry". There were so many points where I loathed a character only to turn around and realize that they had a reason for their actions that just hadn't been presented yet. Nina I hated with an absolute passion. The things she would do to Millie were just terrible. I didn't really approve of Millie's methods for dealing with them either but that is neither here nor there. I found myself really only liking one character in the book throughout the entirety of it and that was Enzo. He was the most raw and pure character of the bunch. He always seemed to have everyone's best interests at heart.
It has been a while since I have read a book that was fade-to-black romance so it was a little jarring when it would get to some of the romance scenes and it would just gloss over it like a young adult book saying something like: "and it was the most wonderful night of my life." Girl... if you don't give some detail on how he managed to make it so wonderful... But I get that not all books need to be heavy into the smut. I did have the book referred to me by SmutTok but, the ladies must have been confused. However, the fact that the romance wasn't spicy did not take away from the overall appeal of the read. I found myself devouring the story like I haven't threw myself into a book in a long time. It was very well written and a masterful work of suspense that kept me guessing. By the end, I shut the book, sat back, and just shook my head in awe of how many twists and turns I just went through having not suspected in the slightest what was going to happen from one page to the next.
The Housemaid is a riveting story of twists and turns that will have your heart pumping and your fingers firmly gripping your seat.
