The author known as Freida McFadden is something of a mystery. “Freida McFadden” is not her real name, and her appearance is disguised in her author photos. In the few interviews she has granted, McFadden has explained that she is a practicing physician, specializing in treating brain injuries, and wants to keep her work as an author separate from her professional practice. McFadden attended Harvard and practices medicine in the Boston area. The pen name “Freida” is a humorous nod to her profession—it is based on the acronym for a medical residency placement tool, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.

McFadden self-published her first book, The Devil Wears Scrubs, in 2013. She continued to self-publish for many years. Finally, she signed with digital publisher Bookouture in 2022. She has written more than two dozen novels and several novellas. Many, such as The Coworker, Ward D, and Never Lie, are stand-alone novels, but she has also written several series. These include the Prescription: Murder novels, the Dr. Jane McGill novels, and the Housemaid novels. This latter series began with one of McFadden’s most popular books, 2022’s The Housemaid. This novel, which won a 2023 International Thriller Writers Award, was an international best seller and is being adapted into a film scheduled to release at the end of 2025. The other three books in the series are novels The Housemaid’s Secret and The Housemaid Is Watching and novella The Housemaid’s Wedding.

McFadden’s thrillers are characterized by their fast pace, simple language, and suspenseful tones. McFadden is particularly well-known for her shocking plot twists and reveals. On her website, she explains that

[R]eaders expect more in a twist these days because everything has already been done. You have to step out of the box of: ‘The suspects were A, B, C, D, and A is the killer.’ It’s not even enough to say E is the killer. It has to be E is the killer because he is actually B, and was the victim’s mother and his daughter, and also was dead the whole time. That is the level of twistiness that is now required (“Writing: Frequently Asked Questions.” Freida McFadden).

In fact, in a 2025 interview with The Times of London, McFadden characterized the ending of her 2019 novel The Ex as “so complicated that [she] is not quite sure she understands it [herself],” admitting that she is dissatisfied with the current state of the ending and would like to revise it (Pavia, Will. “Meet Freida McFadden, the Doctor Hiding Her Secret Life as a Bestselling Author.” The Times, 12 Mar. 2025).

She also admits to being embarrassed at the quality of some of her earlier work in general. After the wild success of The Housemaid, she says, her fans began reading everything in her catalogue—even early novels that do not reflect what she is now capable of as a writer. Regardless of the quality of her earliest books, McFadden has a large and loyal fanbase. She is a wildly popular author on BookTok, TikTok’s community of readers and authors, and she hosts a private Facebook group for her readers that, as of mid-2025, has nearly 250,000 members.

Some critics, however, complain that her plots can be illogical and her writing is formulaic, featuring clichéd and repetitive phrasing and the same character tropes over and over: handsome “perfect” husbands, seemingly loving and normal people who are revealed to be terrible villains, and naive female leads. Some have pointed out that several of McFadden’s books are very similar not just to her own previous works but to well-known works by other authors. The Housemaid (2022), for instance, parallels Liv Constantine’s The Last Mrs. Parrish (2017) in key ways, and The Teacher (2024) is very similar to Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa (2020). The Crash (2025) shares many features with Stephen King’s Misery (1987).