Sometime this year I read my very first book by Freida McFadden called The Housemaid. Although I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to, I still wanted to give her other books a try. And so I proceeded to read The Locked Door and boy, was it a ride! I was hooked from the prologue and found it almost impossible to do anything else but to keep reading. With short, gripping chapters and intriguing characters, The Locked Door had everything that was needed for a great psychological thriller.

Nora Davis is a good surgeon who prefers to lead her life quietly. She is very cautious of the people around her and doesn’t believe in forging any kind of relationships. That’s because many decades ago, Nora’s father was convicted of multiple murders, all of them carried out in her family home’s basement. With her father in prison and a mother who is long dead, Nora likes to be unrecognised and forgotten. But when a similar type of murders are committed again, following the MO of her father, Nora is shaken up. How and who is responsible for copying her father’s actions when he is still in prison?

As Nora tries to figure out this mysterious case, she keeps revisiting her growing up years in her mind. The timeline shifts from past to present as she tries to make sense of things. Some characters are introduced to the story while Freida builds our protagonist’s character cleverly. There’s a lot of suspense to the story and although the end may get a tad bit dramatic, I was in no way disappointed. You may even guess the killer but even this doesn’t dampen the plot.

This was such a refreshing change from The Housemaid. So much so that I immediately read her next book. I’ll post a review of it soon, I promise.