Book Review: The Inmate by Freida McFadden

Domestic Thriller / Released: 2022 [Spoilers hidden in footnotes.]

Quick note: I didn’t receive this book for free, unless you count checking it out from the library. This is an honest review, simply posted because I love this genre. (And her books.)

I won’t say I’m an obsessed, die-hard fan of Freida McFadden’s; however, I am a fan. Before I read The Inmate, I’d also read the following of hers:

• The Housemaid

• The Teacher

• Never Lie

• The Perfect Son

• The Coworker

• The Locked Door

• Do You Remember?

• Dead Med

So far, I think my favorite of hers is Do You Remember? But I digress. Let’s dive into The Inmate.

Let’s start with the premise. The Inmate is about a nurse practitioner who moves back to her hometown in New York after her parents die in an automobile accident. She’s a single mother with some issues with her child’s father, so she hasn’t quite told her son who he is. (It totally makes sense once you read a little further and meet the boy’s father.)

Sounds pretty innocent so far, right? Well, let’s continue.

Poor Brooke can’t find a job at a normal medical facility to save her life, so she’s left with only one option: taking a job at the local maximum-security prison. The problem? Oh, it’s just that her high school sweetheart who also happened to attempt murdering her is serving out his life sentence there. No biggie.

Let’s take a sidebar for a moment. I’m not one of those readers who delights in figuring things out before the ending. I try to work through it in my mind, but I am always way off. So, it’s just sort of a fun ride for me to figure out how Freida layers everything. As an aspiring domestic thriller author myself, part of the reading experience for me is learning what makes a good thriller. (Okay, I’ll stop boring you now.)

In every book I’ve read of hers, there’s some little quirk that gets under my skin because it’s annoying, unlikable, or unrealistic. The quirk in this one that gnawed at me hit me right away.

[Don’t worry. I’ll try my best to hide spoilers in the footnotes. Don’t read them if you don’t want to know the gory details.]

This really isn’t a huge plot point, so I forgot it as I continued to read, but it still was like getting a piece of dust in my eye. It was the bit about Brooke’s ten-year-old son getting bullied for being a “bastard.”

I’ve been a single mother for a long time, and I’ve never, ever heard of this happening to kids in this day and age. Is it possible in certain local cultures? Oh, I’m sure it is. But the way it was written made it seem like it was commonplace in our society. It’s not really that important, though, so it’s just one of those thoughts that sort of takes up space in my brain.

Completely moving on now.

So, I will say Freida subverted my expectations of what I thought the protagonist’s motivations could be. Before I read a single word of the novel, I went into it thinking she had some weird reason why she wanted to work at the prison. Like, maybe she was in on the crime he committed. But no. She knew he was there; however, it was just something she had to deal with.

The point of view was done well, I thought. It goes between present day and eleven years prior to deal with that whole bit about her imprisoned high school sweetheart attempting to murder her. It was paced really well as the present-day events played out—just in time to reveal what really happened in the end.

The eleven-year-old timeline is necessary, first to let readers know why she thinks her ex is a monster and why she’s afraid to see him again.¹ But as Freida pulls back the layers of that particular onion, she reveals that maybe this guy isn’t such a monster after all.

Enter the boy next door. Tim. He’s working as one of the principals at her son’s new school, and they start dating each other. Oh, yeah. He was there the night her friends were murdered too. Immediately, I got the sense that something wasn’t right with this dude.² And Shane, Brooke’s high school sweetheart, is also on that train. He warns her about him.

This story is written in a way that there are only two options for killers: Shane and Tim.³ As things develop, Shane is portrayed as an innocent man framed for the murders, and I was totally on board with that from the moment in their first meeting that he said he was falsely accused. Brooke finally gets on board, too, until a ton of twists and turns convince her of the not-so-obvious third option.

So, the twists and turns throughout were good. At first, they were very subtle, things that didn’t exactly come out of left field. But the really good twists, Freida left for the end, revealing that there was a completely unexpected fourth option I never saw coming.

And not only that, but the epilogue reveals another shocking twist told from her son’s POV that’s pretty heartbreaking.

I read this book in one day, which is pretty typical for me with a well-written thriller. I tend to finish them within a day or two. That’s not always my intention: I typically try to space out my reading to finish within a week. But you know how it is when you absolutely have to find out how the story ends.

Highly recommend this story! As always, Freida McFadden creates pretty great stories. I only found her a couple of years ago, but I’m well on my way to reading her entire catalog of books.

Today, I started reading another book by a different author, and I’ll review that one soon enough. On a Quiet Street by Seraphina Nova Glass. It’s pretty good so far!

1. Turns out, she thinks her high school sweetheart tried to murder her and succeeded in murdering three other people one night at an intimate party they had.

2. I thought this was a predictable red herring because, as a mystery/thriller author for quite some time, I know it’s not going to be the first distraction that’s thrown out there. But it’s not bad to be predictable. I’m sure it was designed that way. However, Freida crafts it in a way that you start to question whether it was truly red herring after all. We don’t find out the truth until almost the very end.

3. There is a less-obvious third option: that they were both in on it. But that turns out to be a red herring too.