Freida McFadden has built her empire on psychological thrillers that make readers simultaneously uncomfortable and unable to look away. Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden continues this tradition while venturing into darker, more provocative territory than her previous works. The novel poses an unsettling question: what happens when a woman who has spent years counseling others to take the high road finally decides to take her own advice—just not the sanitized version she’s been publishing?
The Unraveling of a “Perfect” Life
Debbie Mullen appears to have it all figured out. She’s the beloved advice columnist for the Hingham Household, dispensing wisdom to New England wives who write in seeking guidance about everything from breakfast battles to marital discord. Her column, “Dear Debbie,” has become a fixture in the community—a beacon of practical, levelheaded counsel delivered with warmth and understanding. But beneath this veneer of domestic competence, Debbie is drowning.
McFadden excels at establishing the suffocating mundanity of Debbie’s existence. The author captures the particular exhaustion of middle-aged motherhood with brutal honesty: the daughters who refuse to speak to you before 10 AM, the husband keeping secrets, the career that never quite materialized. Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden opens with Debbie losing her column—the one professional accomplishment she could claim as her own—due to a frivolous lawsuit. It’s the first domino in a series of humiliations that will push our protagonist past her breaking point.
Multiple Perspectives, Mounting Tension
The narrative structure employs alternating viewpoints that gradually illuminate a complex revenge plot. McFadden doesn’t just give us Debbie’s perspective; we hear from Cooper, her well-meaning but oblivious husband; Harley, the gym trainer with her own secrets; and Jesse, Cooper’s workout buddy whose perfect facade conceals something rotten. This technique serves dual purposes: it builds suspense while forcing readers to question whose version of events they can trust.
The chapters labeled “FROM DEAR DEBBIE DRAFTS FILE” provide some of the novel’s most darkly comic moments. These unpublished responses to reader questions reveal Debbie’s increasingly unhinged mindset. Where she once might have suggested communication and compromise, her draft responses now advocate for padlocking doors, installing tracking apps, and far more creative forms of domestic warfare. These interludes function as a pressure gauge, showing us exactly how close Debbie is to explosion.
Vigilante Justice and Uncomfortable Questions
What distinguishes Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden from standard revenge thrillers is its willingness to sit in moral ambiguity. McFadden refuses to provide easy answers about justice, trauma, and vengeance. When Debbie begins systematically targeting people who have wronged her family—a soccer coach who unfairly benched her daughter, a boss who sexually harassed someone, a teenager who distributed revenge porn—readers find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for someone committing increasingly serious crimes.
The author demonstrates genuine understanding of trauma responses and the long shadow cast by sexual assault. Debbie’s college assault, revealed gradually through memory fragments and physical reactions, shaped the trajectory of her entire life. She abandoned her promising tech career, developed debilitating anxiety, and spent two decades trying to convince herself she’d moved past it. McFadden doesn’t sensationalize this trauma; instead, she shows how it can lie dormant before erupting with devastating force.
Technical Prowess Meets Domestic Drama
One of the novel’s clever conceits involves Debbie’s largely abandoned tech skills. Before marriage and motherhood, she was a gifted programmer who could have had a Silicon Valley career. Now she uses those abilities to hack security systems, create tracking apps, and manipulate digital evidence. There’s something satisfying about watching a woman society has dismissed as “just a housewife” weaponize skills everyone assumed she’d forgotten.
McFadden’s plotting here is intricate, perhaps overly so. The various threads—Cooper’s alcoholism, Harley’s affair, the murders, the daughters’ separate crises—occasionally feel like they’re jostling for space. While everything does connect by the novel’s climax, some readers may find the coincidences straining believability. The twist involving Jesse’s true identity works because it’s been carefully foreshadowed, but the sheer number of revelations packed into the final chapters can feel overwhelming.
The Marriage at the Center
Underneath the murder plot, Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden is ultimately examining a marriage in crisis. Cooper and Debbie have been keeping secrets from each other for so long that they’ve become strangers sharing a house. Cooper’s hidden alcoholism and Debbie’s suppressed trauma have created parallel lives that barely intersect. When they finally start communicating honestly—albeit while standing outside a crime scene—it’s both absurd and oddly moving.
The novel’s treatment of Cooper deserves particular attention. He could easily have been written as a villain or a buffoon, but McFadden gives him genuine depth. His addiction is treated seriously, not as a plot device. His love for Debbie feels authentic even when it’s inadequate. Their journey toward rebuilding trust provides the emotional core that elevates this beyond a simple revenge fantasy.
Where the Formula Shows Its Seams
For all its strengths, Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden occasionally feels constrained by thriller genre expectations. The pacing accelerates so dramatically in the final third that character development gets sacrificed for plot momentum. Harley, who initially seems positioned as a complex character, ultimately serves primarily as a plot function. Some of Debbie’s more elaborate schemes require suspension of disbelief that may challenge readers seeking gritty realism.
The book’s treatment of its themes can also feel inconsistent. McFadden clearly wants to explore serious questions about justice for sexual assault survivors and the inadequacy of institutional responses. But the dark humor and pulpy elements sometimes undercut these more substantive concerns. The novel never quite decides whether it’s a serious examination of trauma or a cathartic revenge fantasy, leaving it awkwardly straddling both.
Additionally, while McFadden has stated her books avoid graphic content, some readers may still find certain themes—particularly those involving sexual assault and violence against women—difficult to engage with, even when handled with relative restraint.
McFadden’s Evolution as a Thriller Writer
Readers familiar with McFadden’s previous work, particularly The Housemaid series and The Coworker, will recognize her signature style while noting an evolution in ambition. Where those books operated within more conventional thriller frameworks—twisted employer relationships, workplace murder mysteries—Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden attempts something more sprawling and thematically dense. The results are uneven but frequently compelling.
The author’s gift for addictive pacing remains intact. This is a book designed to be consumed in large gulps, with chapters that end on hooks calculated to keep pages turning well past bedtime. McFadden understands the psychological mechanics of suspense, knowing exactly when to reveal information and when to withhold it. Even when the plot mechanics creak, the forward momentum rarely flags.
The Epilogue’s Implications
Without spoiling specifics, the novel’s epilogue deserves discussion for how it reframes everything that came before. McFadden provides a flash-forward that shows the aftermath of Debbie’s choices, and it’s here that the book’s darkest implications emerge. The “happily ever after” presented is deeply compromised, built on foundations of violence and deception that can never fully be acknowledged. It’s a bold ending that asks readers to sit with the consequences of vigilante justice rather than simply celebrating it.
Verdict: A Flawed but Riveting Addition to McFadden’s Canon
Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden won’t work for everyone. Its tonal shifts may frustrate readers seeking either pure escapism or serious literary examination of trauma. The plot’s baroque complexity occasionally obscures its thematic concerns. But for those willing to engage with its contradictions, the novel offers a compulsively readable exploration of rage, revenge, and the various forms of justice available to women in an unjust world.
McFadden has crafted something genuinely subversive here: a thriller that makes you examine your own appetite for vengeance even as it feeds that appetite. It’s a book about the poisonous effect of secrets on marriage, the way trauma can detonate years after the fact, and what happens when “good for her” becomes a moral philosophy rather than just a meme. The execution may be imperfect, but the ambition is admirable, and the result is undeniably gripping.
Fans of McFadden’s previous work will find much to appreciate while noting the darker edges. New readers should be prepared for moral complexity alongside the page-turning suspense. This isn’t a book that will leave you comfortable, but it will keep you thinking long after you’ve turned the final page.
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Similar Revenge Thrillers:
“The Last Mrs. Parrish” by Liv Constantine – Features another seemingly perfect housewife with dark secrets and elaborate schemes for revenge against those who’ve wronged her.
“My Lovely Wife” by Samantha Downing – Explores a suburban couple’s secret life of violence, examining marriage and morality with dark humor similar to McFadden’s approach.
“The Perfect Marriage” by Jeneva Rose – Another thriller centered on a seemingly ideal marriage hiding dangerous secrets, with multiple perspective shifts.
“The Push” by Ashley Audrain – While less focused on revenge, it shares the examination of motherhood’s darker aspects and generational trauma.
“The Silent Patient” by Alex Michaelides – Features an unreliable narrator harboring dark secrets and a shocking twist about past trauma.
“The Woman in the Window” by A.J. Finn – Psychological thriller with an isolated protagonist whose past trauma shapes her present actions in unexpected ways.