Advice columns run on a fiction, that the person answering has her own house in order, and this audiobook takes that fiction apart with obvious pleasure. Debbie Mullen has spent years telling the wives of New England what to do about husbands who ignore them, belittle them or worse. Then she loses the column, notices her teenage daughters behaving strangely, and starts reading her husband's movements off a tracking app she put on his phone herself. Freida McFadden's setup is efficient to the point of ruthlessness, and it is fully loaded before the first hour is out.
Suburban Satire More Than Crime Novel
Managing expectations is the most useful thing anyone has said about this book, and the four-star verdict posted the day after release does it best: this is not an intricate weave of unguessable twists, and going in wanting one will spoil what the book actually is. That reader had a hunch about where things were heading, turned out to be partly right, and enjoyed the ride regardless. It is a rare piece of honest calibration in a review pool.
Debbie herself is why it works. A column called Dear Debbie, a readership of women dismissed at home, and a columnist who has absorbed years of that correspondence before her own life tilts: the machinery of the revenge plot is already assembled by the time she decides to use it. McFadden does not overbuild. The pleasure here is watching somebody with a professional habit of restraint decide, in real time, to stop exercising it.
Above the payback plot sits the framing the publisher puts on the book, a story about women taking justice into their own hands. That is a crowded shelf with a lot of blunt entries on it. This one keeps its stakes domestic and its motives legible, and the result reads closer to a satire of suburban politeness than to a crime novel, which is the more interesting of the two things it could have been.
Whelan Narrates a Twisted Take on Dear Abby
Cindy's five-star response names the appeal precisely: a twisted take on Dear Abby. Debbie comes across as secretive, unpredictable, vengeful and dangerous, and by that same account the best wife and mother around, which is exactly the contradiction the book is built to sustain. You are never asked to disapprove of her. You are asked to admire the competence, and admiring it is easy.
Years of letters give the premise more work to do than a simple grudge would. Debbie's targets are the people in her own life rather than the husbands her correspondents wrote in about, so the column functions as the standard she has spent a career applying to everybody else. Taking her own advice is the joke and the plot at the same time, and McFadden gets real mileage out of a woman who has been the reasonable one professionally.
Julia Whelan is credited as the reader, and not one of the five written responses on this page mentions the recording at all. Every one of them describes reading: a page turner, a book finished in a single sitting, chapters that pulled. So you get a first-rank narration credit next to a review pool that appears to have arrived through print, and a 4.2 that grades the novel rather than the production.
Shelved as Literary Fiction, Sold as a Thriller
Predictability is the charge McFadden's readers argue about most, and a March 2026 response takes it head on, telling anyone who finds her plots easy to call that this one has a turn they will not see. The same reader was less happy with a stretch set at Haley's apartment, describing it as the part they enjoyed least while still recommending the book warmly. Both halves of that verdict are worth carrying in.
Scores repay a second look here. The five written verdicts average 4.4 between them while the 98 counted ratings settle at 4.2, so the people who took the time to write ran slightly warmer than the crowd that only clicked. Three of those five sit at four stars rather than five, and all three are positive. This is a book landing solidly, not one splitting its audience down the middle.
Category filing is the other thing to flag. The publisher's own copy calls this a biting subversive thriller and the responses treat it as one, yet the listing shelves it under literary fiction with a generic genre tag rather than on the mystery and thriller side of the catalog. Browse by category and you will probably never meet it. Search the author instead.
Dark Comedy Runs Through This Domestic Thriller
Revenge plots where the protagonist is competent and the audience is invited to cheer are the exact target here. One February verdict, filed at four stars, arrived for the advice-column hook, stayed for the family, and found plenty of drama across the several perspectives the book moves between. If a domestic thriller with a wide streak of dark comedy is your register, this lands in it.
Pass on it if you need a puzzle that defeats you, because the book is not engineered for that and never claims to be. Pass as well if household surveillance, teenage daughters in trouble and casual marital cruelty are subjects you would rather not spend the better part of eight hours inside, since all three are handled without flinching and the tracking app is played for comedy as often as for menace.
McFadden publishes fast, and the risk with any writer at that pace is that the books begin to feel like variations on one another. This one has a genuinely good central idea, an advice columnist who runs out of advice, and it spends its length on that idea rather than on machinery. How much the ending satisfies will come down to how badly you needed to be surprised by it.
