Books like The Housemaid

Colleen Hoover's Verity follows Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired by the husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford to finish the remaining books in Verity's series after she is left incapacitated by an accident. While working in the Crawford home, Lowen discovers an unfinished autobiography hidden in Verity's office, and the manuscript contains confessions so disturbing that Lowen questions whether Verity's accident was really an accident at all. The setup mirrors The Housemaid's structure: an outsider enters a wealthy household and gradually uncovers the rot beneath the polished surface.

Hoover ratchets up the tension by alternating between Lowen's present-day chapters and Verity's manuscript, and the two narratives contradict each other in ways that keep you guessing until the final page. The romantic tension between Lowen and Verity's husband adds another layer of complication, blurring the line between attraction and self-preservation. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, and readers have argued about its meaning since publication.

Like The Housemaid, this book trusts readers to handle moral gray areas.

Ruth Ware's The Turn of the Key places a young nanny named Rowan Caine in a smart home in the Scottish Highlands where the technology watches everything and the previous nanny left without explanation. Rowan writes the entire novel as a letter from prison, telling her lawyer what happened and why she is not guilty of the crime she has been convicted of.

The locked-room quality of the remote house, the surveillance technology that tracks every movement, and the slowly escalating sense that Rowan is not safe all echo The Housemaid's claustrophobic atmosphere. Ware is skilled at making ordinary domestic details feel sinister, and the children in Rowan's care are unsettling in ways that never quite cross into supernatural territory.

The Scottish setting adds isolation that amplifies the dread, and Rowan's increasing desperation as events spiral out of control makes for tense reading. The twist involves the identity of the person Rowan has been writing to, and it reframes the entire narrative in a way that fans of McFadden's structural tricks will appreciate.

McFadden's own Never Lie is a tight, single-setting thriller about a newlywed couple who get stranded in the abandoned mansion of Dr. Adrienne Hale, a psychiatrist who disappeared without a trace. While trapped by a snowstorm, they discover audio recordings of Dr.

Hale's therapy sessions with a patient named PL, and each recording reveals more about the doctor's dangerous methods and the patient's growing instability. The novel unfolds almost entirely through these recordings and the couple's reactions to them, creating a nesting-doll structure where every revelation changes the meaning of what came before. Like The Housemaid, McFadden plays with reader expectations about who is the victim and who is the threat, and the final twist lands hard.

The confined setting works to the book's advantage, forcing characters (and readers) to confront uncomfortable truths with no escape route. At under 300 pages, it moves at a sprint, and the short chapters make it nearly impossible to stop reading once you start. If you loved The Housemaid's structural games, this is McFadden at her trickiest.

Liv Constantine's The Last Mrs Parrish introduces Amber Patterson, a woman who deliberately befriends Daphne Parrish, the wealthy wife of Jackson Parrish, with the goal of stealing her life. The first half follows Amber's calculated campaign to replace Daphne, and readers who think they know where the story is heading will find themselves wrong-footed when the perspective shifts to Daphne at the midpoint.

That structural pivot echoes The Housemaid's mid-book reversal, where McFadden reveals that the person you thought was the villain might be something else entirely. Constantine writes the wealthy Connecticut setting with cold precision, and the social dynamics of charity galas and country clubs become the arena for a brutal power struggle.

Amber is a fascinating antagonist because her motivations are rooted in genuine deprivation, and Daphne's transformation from apparent victim to active agent is satisfying in a way that avoids easy moralizing. The marriage at the center of the book is toxic in specific, believable ways, and both women are fighting for survival within a system that gives men all the power.

Jason Rekulak's Hidden Pictures hires Mallory Quinn, a recovering addict working as a live-in nanny for a five-year-old boy named Teddy who has started drawing pictures of a woman and a forest that he claims come from his imaginary friend Anya. The drawings grow more detailed and more disturbing, and Mallory begins to suspect they depict a real crime. Rekulak includes the actual drawings in the text, and watching them evolve from childish scribbles to detailed crime scenes is genuinely unsettling.

Like The Housemaid, this book puts a working-class woman in a wealthy family's home and lets the class tension fuel the suspense. Mallory's sobriety adds stakes that go beyond the mystery: if she makes the wrong move, she loses not just her job but her recovery. The book alternates between supernatural and rational explanations for the drawings, keeping readers off balance until the final act commits to one interpretation.

The suburban New Jersey setting looks safe from the outside but hides something ugly, and Mallory's outsider status means nobody takes her concerns seriously until it is almost too late.

Lisa Jewell's None of This Is True begins when a true crime podcaster named Alix Summer meets Josie Fair at a birthday dinner and Josie volunteers to be a subject for Alix's podcast. As Alix records their interviews, Josie's story shifts from sad to strange to terrifying, and Alix realizes too late that she has invited a dangerous person into her life. Jewell structures the novel through multiple formats: podcast transcripts, police interviews, text messages, and traditional narration, and the fragmented storytelling keeps readers guessing about what is real and what Josie has fabricated.

The domestic settings feel ordinary until they become threatening, and Jewell is skilled at making the reader complicit in Alix's mistakes. Like The Housemaid, this book is about a woman who enters someone else's domestic space and slowly takes control. The power reversal happens incrementally, and by the time Alix understands what is happening, Josie has already won several rounds.

The podcast framing adds a meta layer about true crime consumption that gives the thriller extra bite.

A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window confines Anna Fox, an agoraphobic child psychologist, to her New York brownstone where she watches her neighbors through the window and drinks too much wine.

When a new family moves in across the street, Anna believes she witnesses a violent crime, but no one believes her because her medication, her isolation, and her drinking make her an unreliable witness. The confined setting works the same way the Winchester house does in The Housemaid: the walls close in, the protagonist cannot escape, and the truth is hiding in plain sight. Finn layers multiple unreliable elements on top of each other, so readers must decide what Anna actually saw versus what she imagined or misremembered.

The Hitchcock influences are worn openly, with Anna watching classic thrillers on her laptop throughout the novel, and the paranoid atmosphere builds steadily. The twist involves a character who is not who they claim to be, and the revelation reshuffles the entire plot. Like McFadden, Finn understands that the best twists do not just surprise you; they make you question your own reading.