#BookReview ‘The Locked Door’ by Freida McFadden

About the book…

Some doors are locked for a reason…

While eleven-year-old Nora Davis was up in her bedroom doing homework, she had no idea her father was killing women in the basement.

Until the day the police arrived at their front door.

Decades later, Nora’s father is spending his life behind bars, and Nora is a successful surgeon with a quiet, solitary existence. Nobody knows her father was a notorious serial killer. And she intends to keep it that way.

Then Nora discovers one of her young female patients has been murdered. In the same unique and horrific manner that her father used to kill his victims.

Somebody knows who Nora is. Somebody wants her to take the fall for this unthinkable crime. But she’s not a killer like her father. The police can’t pin anything on her.

As long as they don’t look in her basement.

Published in 2021 by Poisoned Pen Press, ‘The Locked Door’ is my first Freida McFadden title after having seen her name and books all over the place.

The locked door refers to 2 actual, and 1 metaphorical barriers to Nina Davis, a surgeon who is, unknown to her patients, partners and the public at large, the daughter of the serial killer known as the Handyman.

Raised by her maternal grandmother after the suicide of her  mother and incarceration of her father, Nina has changed her name and channelled all her energy into saving lives.

But is this daughter so different from her father?

Every week, letters arrive from his prison cell to be chucked in the bin, she chooses not to have children in case hereditary psychosis is handed down like the worst of bequests.. Relationships are brief and forgettable, and her overly large home is bare and empty. But, unlike her childhood home, the basement door is not locked…

She keeps it un locked because this is the door which kept her out of her father’s ‘workroom’ where he was supposed to be practicing carpentry, but was instead holding women captive till he killed them.

A chance hook up with a college friend reveals another locked door in his apartment-what could need to be kept under lock and key in a flat that only he lives he? What is he hiding and why does the elderly landlady keep mentioning that she hears a woman’s scream coming from there, late at  night?

Why is someone following her on her way home from work?

Why have 2 of her patients, remarkably similar to her father’s victims, been killed in identical ways?

Who is forcing her to open the door in her subconscious , and face what has been suppressed for so long?

I found this book an engaging thriller, so over exposition and plot discrepancies were overlooked because the story was just sweeping you along from first page to last. The first person narrative makes the reader feel like Nora is confiding directly to you as she tries to make sense of exactly who and what is targeting her long established safe life.

Have you read any of Freida’s books?

Have you read this one?

If so, drop me a line with your thoughts and recommendations!

About the author…

#1 New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and Amazon Charts bestselling author Freida McFadden is a practicing physician specializing in brain injury who has penned multiple Kindle bestselling psychological thrillers and medical humor novels.

She lives with her family and possessed cat in a centuries-old three-story home overlooking the ocean, with staircases that creak and moan with each step, and nobody could hear you if you scream. Unless you scream really loudly, maybe.

Links-https://www.freidamcfadden.com/

Twitter @PPPress @Freida_McFadden