The Housemaid

The Housemaid is a 2021 thriller by Sarah A. Denzil, author of Silent Child. It is a separate book from Freida McFadden's identically titled novel.

Twenty-one, broke and freshly out of a rehabilitation programme, the narrator talks her way into a live-in housemaid post at Highwood Hall, a sprawling Tudor estate in Yorkshire owned by the wealthy Howard family. She does not want the work. She wants the house, because her mother worked there two decades ago and she has never been told the truth about what happened.

The job turns strange immediately. The housekeeper, Mrs Huxley, materialises out of the shadows to watch her. Lord Howard's son Alex takes an interest she knows better than to return. And a package arrives on her first day containing a diorama of a gruesome scene set inside the Hall itself. As she works through the estate's hidden tunnels and peepholes, the family's secrets close in around her.

It is the first book in Denzil's Highwood Hall sequence.