The Housemaid

I bought this ages ago when it was on offer for 99p, and long before the film version came out. It’s not easy to know what makes a book on a to-read pile (virtual or otherwise) suddenly become the one you want to read next. But for whatever reason, I picked it up this week.

What felt like it was going to be a pretty predictable tale soon served up numerous twists and turns. I used to apologise about guilty pleasures, but if something brings you joy, you shouldn’t ever have to apologise about it. Sure, it felt like devouring a large bar of chocolate rather than eating a plate of vegetables, but who cares. You can’t live on chocolate, but it sure makes life better.

It’s engineered to keep you reading: short chapters, sharp pivots, and just enough misdirection to wrong-foot you. In the end, that’s what it gave me—a few hours of being happily, totally absorbed. Not profound, but satisfying in exactly the way a good thriller should be: tight, twisty, and genuinely hard to put down. Sometimes the point of reading is simply to enjoy yourself, and this did the job perfectly.