The Intruder

Freida McFadden has become a kind of TikTok-era Hitchcock: the patron saint of the fast, twisty domestic thriller that you inhale in one evening and then immediately need to discuss with someone, anyone. The Intruder is very much in that vein. A taut, breathless, one-sitting novel engineered not for literary contemplation but for compulsion.

McFadden’s prose is stripped to the bone — short chapters, cliffhanger pivots, the quiet cruelty of a well-timed reveal. She builds dread not through blood or baroque violence but through proximity: the idea that danger is already inside the house, inside the marriage, inside the self-image. She understands the fundamental terror of domestic fiction: the call is coming from inside your own life.

The book is also a reminder of McFadden’s signature trick — she controls information like a miser. What the reader thinks they know is always a carefully arranged illusion. She knows exactly when to feed a detail, when to starve the narrative, when to make the reader second-guess their own common sense.

Is it high literature? No — and it doesn’t pretend to be. This is a thriller that believes thrill is enough. And McFadden is extremely good at that promise: velocity, shock, re-contextualization, late-book gut-punch.

A handful of readers will inevitably say “That twist could never happen.” But that’s the wrong measure. The question is: did you need to know how it ends? And the answer here is absolutely yes. McFadden writes to hijack your night — and she succeeds.