Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid Series follows Millie Calloway, a young woman who uses violence to protect herself and other women from the violence of the men around them. She spent a decade in prison for killing a boy who was trying to rape her friend. Millie bashed his head with a paperweight until he died. Millie also had several other violent incidents on her record: She slashed a teacher’s tires because he threatened to fail her unless she let him touch her inappropriately, and punched a coworker at a diner for groping her.

In The Housemaid, Millie is living in her car and struggling to find work. She is hired as a live-in housemaid by Nina Winchester, a wealthy woman in her late 30s who has a daughter named Cecelia. Nina initially seems kind, though her behavior is increasingly erratic: Millie is given an attic room that locks from the outside; Nina is on antipsychotic medication after attempting to kill Cecelia when she was a baby; and Nina’s relationship with her husband Andrew deteriorates. Andrew and Millie start a relationship, but Millie soon finds out the truth: Andrew is a sadistic abuser. He locks Millie in the attic and tortures her; he also framed Nina for harming Cecelia and conspired to depict her as having a mental health condition to discredit her version of events after she confided about the abuse to Enzo, their landscaper whose sister was killed by her abusive husband.