Do Not Disturb

Freida McFadden is a best-selling psychological thriller author. She is American, born in New York City on May 1st, 1980, and currently living in Boston with her husband and two children. McFadden is her pen name. She is a doctor, specializing in brain injuries. Initially, she self-published her books, but found success with her 2022 thriller The Housemaid and its two sequels, The Housemaid’s Secret (2023) and The Housemaid is Watching (2024). Since finding success with her writing, she has curtailed her medical practice to part-time hours to devote more time to creating new thrillers.

Central to McFadden’s work is her focus on human psychology. She primarily uses the first-person point of view, as she does in Do Not Disturb, to emphasize her characters’ subjectivity and limited point of view. Her narrative style also helps to build suspense, as she often features unreliable narrators who share varying amounts of guilt and culpability. For example, in The Coworker (2023), Natalie reports her missing coworker, Dawn. As the narrative unfolds through Natalie’s perspective and a series of emails written by Dawn, Dawn is revealed to have orchestrated her disappearance and faked her own death to frame Natalie. The two perspectives work in tandem to build suspense and intrigue, while exploring themes of deception, jealousy, and greed. Ultimately, Natalie has secrets of her own, with she and Dawn becoming close in the end over their deceptions.

Similarly, McFadden’s 2024 novel The Boyfriend follows Sydney, a 34-year-old woman using a dating app to find love. She meets a doctor, Tom, and they start dating, until Sydney learns of his troubled past and that he has been lying to her. The narrative then shifts to the past, when Tom was a teenager, revealing that he was suspected in the death of two of his classmates. After building suspense around Tom and Sydney’s relationship in the present, McFadden uses her shifting narration to slowly reveal Tom’s secrets that have followed him throughout his life.



Do Not Disturb thus reflects some of the key literary techniques and themes that predominant in McFadden’s works. As with many of her other novels, Do Not Disturb features unreliable first-person narrators and plot twists, while placing thematic emphasis on the deceptive nature of appearances, the tensions in interpersonal relationships, and the dangers of keeping dark secrets.