Sally Hepworth subverts the conventions of the domestic-suspense genre by centering the narrative on Elsie Fitzpatrick, an octogenarian woman who is a convicted murderer. Although female protagonists are typical of domestic suspense, they’re generally younger and more emotionally vulnerable than Elsie is. Often, the protagonist is an ordinary wife or mother whose psychological state becomes precarious as she uncovers dark secrets within her home. One example is Hannah Hall, the protagonist of Laura Dave’s 2021 bestseller, The Last Thing He Told Me. Hannah is a 40-year-old suburban wife and stepmother whose life is upended when her husband disappears. A major source of tension in the novel is Hannah’s confusion and concern as she gradually learns that her husband was keeping dangerous secrets from her. In this vulnerable state, Hannah struggles to find answers about her husband’s disappearance and protect her stepdaughter from the consequences of her father’s choices.

Protagonists like Hannah highlight how vulnerable women can be when they perform the role that society expects of their gender. The typical protagonist of domestic suspense is a model of socially approved femininity: attractive, still relatively young, concerned about others’ comfort and approval, and defined more by relationships than by achievements in the world outside the home. Often, despite performing the role society expects of them, these women are betrayed by the very partners, children, or parents to whom they have devoted their lives. In Freida McFadden’s The Wife Upstairs, protagonist Sylvia works as a caregiver for a disabled woman named Victoria. While Sylvia is engaged in the stereotypically feminine task of caregiving, Victoria’s husband, Adam, tries to seduce her. Later, Sylvia learns that he has betrayed Victoria in other, much more serious ways. Both Victoria’s and Sylvia’s lives are irreparably damaged by Adam’s choices. In The Push: Mother. Daughter. Angel. Monster? by Ashley Audrain, protagonist Blythe Connor has to confront the possibility that her young daughter, Violet, may be a cold-blooded killer. Blythe’s entire life falls apart as she struggles to find the truth and do what is right for her loved ones.

Critic Judy Burman has pointed out that most domestic thrillers rely on the trope of a woman with a “perfect life” that becomes “a nightmare”: “These are the contours of the contemporary domestic thriller, a niche that has come to dominate every form of narrative entertainment by, for, and about women,” she explains. “Domestic thrillers have always existed because women’s fears of patriarchal violence and control, particularly in the supposed sanctuary of the home, spring eternal,” but they have become even more popular as women’s power has come increasingly under threat in the United States’ highly polarized political climate (Burman, Judy. “Domestic Thrillers Aren’t Just a Trend. They’re the Defining Metaphor of Our Time.” Time, 30 Jan. 2026).

Elsie, as an 81-year-old convicted killer, is an unconventional protagonist for domestic suspense. She has considerably more life experience than protagonists like Hannah, Sylvia, and Blythe, and these life experiences have made her cynical and self-protective. While the typical protagonist of domestic suspense is deeply enmeshed in close relationships that create significant vulnerabilities, Elsie keeps herself at a distance from others. She is so self-possessed that, after being accused of her neighbor’s murder, she’s able to make the sardonic joke that, when it comes to murder, two groups are rarely suspected: “elderly women and little girls” (1). This cynical joke highlights the irony that Elsie herself has now been accused of murder twice: once as a teenage girl and once as an elderly woman.

Elsie jokes that this makes her “special,” which is true in one sense but false in another. She’s certainly an anomaly in that she has been twice accused of murder. Elsie’s situation, however, underscores the fact that, in a patriarchal society, women of all ages and descriptions are vulnerable no matter what choices they make. As a child, Elsie is not small, pretty, demure, or socially adept in the ways that women and girls are expected to be, making her an outcast. Her father is able to take advantage of her isolation and spread rumors about her, knowing that she has almost no support network to counter the misperceptions of her that he encourages. Because teenage Elsie responds violently to her father’s emotional abuse and violence against her aunt, she becomes even more of an outcast. When the story opens, she’s an elderly woman and convicted murderer. Her age and history are both sources of strength and sources of vulnerability. Strangers and neighbors alike judge her, and she’s harassed by the police and by protesters. In focusing the story on an unconventional protagonist like Elsie, Hepworth extends the domestic thriller’s conversation about the vulnerability of women into new territory, making the point that it’s not just “perfect” women with “perfect” lives who are endangered in the seeming safety of domestic spaces.