The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden - A Book Review
Synopsis:
Victoria Barnett has it all.
A great career. A handsome and loving husband. A beautiful home in the suburbs and a plan to fill it with children. Life is perfect—or so it seems.
Then she’s in a terrible accident… and everything falls apart.
Now Victoria is unable to walk. She can’t feed or dress herself. She can’t even speak. She is confined to the top floor of her house with twenty-four-hour care.
Sylvia Robinson is hired by Victoria’s husband to help care for her. But it turns out Victoria isn’t as impaired as Sylvia was led to believe. There’s a story Victoria desperately wants to tell… if only she could get out the words.
Then Sylvia discovers Victoria’s diary hidden away in a drawer.
And what’s inside is shocking.
Genre: Suspenseful Mystery-Thriller Fiction
Themes:
- Toxic Relationship
- Love Bombing
- Mental Illness
- Manipulation
- Medical Illness
- Wealthy Family
Freida McFadden is an author who’s been on my radar since late 2023. I first read The Housemaid, followed by The Housemaid’s Secret and I’m desperately awaiting the release of the final book, The Housemaid is Watching.
I have to be honest, I wasn’t massively blown away by my introduction to Freida’s writing. I rated The Housemaid and The Housemaid’s Secret 4 ⭐️’s and I enjoyed it, but at the time I was seeking the heart racing thrill that I experienced from Verity. However, I enjoyed her writing, so when I came across The Wife Upstairs and its similarities to Verity, it quickly went in my TBR jar and surprise, it was picked as my fourth – when will I stop listing the book number it is from the TBR jar?
The Wife Upstairs follows main protagonist Sylvia in a restaurant preparing for an impending job interview. We first meet Sylvia in her attempt to save an elderly woman from choking to death, only the lady accuses Sylvia of attempting to mug her. Just when Sylvia thinks she’ll be getting into trouble with the police due to the accusation, in steps Adam Barnett who witnessed the ordeal and confirmed that Sylvia was not mugging the lady, but attempting to save her life.
After the accusation, Adam revealed that he is waiting to interview someone, who seemly hasn’t turned up. This prompts Sylvia to reveal that she was supposed to be on her way to an interview herself, but feels too flustered to go following the event. Adam offers Sylvia the interview instead. At first Sylvia is apprehensive, but eventually agrees.
During the interview, Adam revealed the nature of the job role – that being Sylvia would be required to help Adam’s wife, Victoria who has recently become ill, but not detailing too much about her condition.
Reluctantly, Sylvia agrees to take the job, seeing as she’s about to be made homeless unless she finds a job and Adams job offer comes with a room at their home, due to them living so far away from the city to commute.
When Sylvia arrives, she sees that Adam and Victoria live in a mansion that has become neglected and overgrown with plants. After arriving, Sylvia is introduced to Victoria where she discovers that Victoria is wheel chair bound, following a fall down their spiral staircase that left her with a permanent brain injury. Sylvia’s role is to be a friend to Victoria, where she will spend her time with her when Adam is working and her nurse is on rest.
As she starts her first day working for the Barnetts, Sylvia learns that Victoria has impaired speech and has paralysis down one side of her body, making everyday tasks extremely difficult. Instantly, Victoria points Sylvia in the direction of a draw which contains her diary. She encourages Sylvia to take it and read it.
When arriving at the Barnetts, Sylvia believed that Victoria was a lucky lady with a nice lifestyle and a handsome husband, who had an unfortunate and terrible accident – leaving her husband to care for her and to loose the wife she believed Victoria was. This leads Sylvia to be sympathetic to both Victoria and Adam, but more specifically towards Adam, who she has a small crush and admiration for, which eventually results in Adam and Sylvia sleeping together.
Sylvia begins reading Victorias diary, which starts at the beginning of her and Adam’s relationship. It details how they met – Victoria being an ER nurse and Adam being a patient, following a cooking accident which resulted in him needing stitches. In the diary, Victoria details how their short relationship developed quickly over a short amount of time, with the purpose of the diary initially being for Victoria and Adam’s future children to read one day to look back on the story of how their parents met. However, the more Sylvia reads, the more she discovers the perfect picture family is far from what it seems.
As Sylvia reads more, she learns that Adam is not quite the caring husband that he has portrayed to Sylvia. He ends up being a narcissistic, love bombing psychopath who repeatedly put Victoria down. Victoria details in the diary how Adam’s true colours didn’t become apparent until the day before their wedding day, in which Victoria still went ahead with because she believed it was true love.
After they married, Adam made the decision to move him and Victoria to Monatauk, which is hours away from the city where Victoria worked and loved, without consulting Victoria prior to the decision. Adam gaslights Victoria into agreeing to move to Monatauk as he accuses her wanting to stay because of an affair he believed she was having with her co worker, Mack. In the end, Victoria agrees to move away with Adam, leaving behind her nursing job and all her friends.
When arriving at their new home, Victoria struggles to find a replacement job, but Adam encourages her to be a housewife instead of looking for a new job, in hopes of eventually becoming a stay at home mum. However, when Victoria takes on the housewife role and ends up spending her time eating and spending Adam’s money, Adam gaslights her stating that all she does is be lazy and spend his money, when it was his idea and even accuses her of only marrying him for his money.
Adam ends up setting up a spending allowance in which he monitors and has the approval of all of Victorias spending purchases. When Victoria asks for permission to use her allowance at the gym to loose weight, Adam accuses her of only wanting to go to see other men.
Adam is a famous author, who is popular among the thriller genre. During a diary entry. Victoria details how Adam wrote a book about a lazy wife who was cheating on her husband and spending all his money. At the end of the story, the wife is killed as punishment from the husband. Victoria is left uneasy at the similarities of the names of the characters in the book, to her life. Jack is Mack and Nicki is Vicky. Only when Victoria confronts Adam about these similarities, he brushes her off. Victoria believes it to be a warning of what Adam is capable of.
In an interaction with Victoria, she tells Sylvia that there is a gun in Adam’s wardrobe. Victoria encourages Sylvia to retrieve it, which Sylvia reluctantly does. When she retrieves it, Sylvia puts it in a locked chest, per Victoria’s request.
During another diary entry, Victoria’s friends come to visit her new life, but quickly leave following Adam’s outburst of not wanting guests, which he had previously approved of having.
As Sylvia works more and more with Victoria, she realises a pattern in Victorias behaviour – she is extremely lethargic in the mornings and despises receiving her medication from Adam in her feeding tube. This prompts Adam to request Sylvia to ensure Victoria’s nails are cut as short as possible, as she claws at him during the medication session. When Sylvia enquires about the nature of the medication, Adam reveals that they are for her seizures, but when Sylvia googles the names, she quickly realises it’s for sedating and not for seizures. Adam is deliberately administering medication to prevent Victoria from being comprehensive. In connection with Victoria’s diary entries, Sylvia realises that Adam is not the doting husband she believed him to be. She decides to volunteer giving the medication to help take weight off Adam, only she deliberately stops giving Victoria the medication, which reveals that Victoria is more comprehensive than she was, the more she is weaned off the medication.
When Victoria’s friends return home, they express their concern for her isolated new life. This encourages a visit from Victoria’s paramedic friend Mack, who hopes to visit to rescue Victoria. Only Victoria isn’t ready to leave without giving Adam an explanation. During their conversation, Victoria reveals how the picture perfect marriage was a lie and she is realising the cracks in Adam’s personality. Unexpectedly, Adam returns home and offers Mack a ride to the train station because of the impending bad weather conditions. Adam returns home after dropping Mack off and Victoria receives a text from Mack stating he was on the train home. Only a few days later, Victoria and Adam are visited by the police who are looking for Mack as he failed to return home after his visit. Adam reveals that he shot Mack and threatens Victoria from going to the police, as he reveals that he shot mack with a gun he purchased in Victoria’s name, that also has her fingerprints on it from when they first got it – meaning that if Victoria goes to the police, she’d be framed for his murder and therefore is trapped from leaving Adam.
At the end of Victoria’s diary, it is revealed that she is finally pregnant after months of trying. Now that she has a baby on the way, she decides she’s ready to leave Adam. Only that is last diary entry she made before her subsequent injury.
When working around the house, the housekeepers tell Sylvia of Adam and Victoria’s strained relationship leading up to the accident, detailing how crazy Victoria was. This leads Sylvia to believe she’s been manipulated by Victoria and her diary, so she goes to retrieve the gun – only Victoria reassures her that it’s safe in the box. Sylvia goes to confess what she learned in Victoria’s diary to Adam, who reveals that Victoria was crazy and that she was responsible for all the dents in the walls around the house.
When Adam is informed that Victoria now has the gun, he goes to retrieve it – only when opening the door, he is met with Victoria who has the gun in her good hand. Victoria attempts to shoot Adam but misses due to her injury. Sylvia tackles the gun from Victoria, but the power outage means Sylvia doesn’t realise they’re on the edge of the staircase. The pair fall down, resulting in Victoria’s death. Adam and Sylvia make up a story that the power cut caused Victoria and Sylvia to fall down the stairs. Sylvia is encouraged to go to hospital to have her concussion checked, only she declines. When speaking to the paramedic, he reveals that he knew of Victoria through a man named Glen MacNeil, who was in love with Victoria, but randomly disappeared. Sylvia connects the dots and realises that Victoria’s diary was the truth. When the paramedics leave, Sylvia goes to investigate the shed that Victoria has previously encouraged her to look at. Everything seems normal until she leans down to a hatch and smells decay, there she realises where Mack is. Adam is behind her with a gun and confesses to everything Victoria detailed in her diary, but before Adam can pull the trigger, Sylvia’s persistent ex boyfriend Freddie comes to the rescue.
A few months later, Adam is sent to jail for everything and Sylvia is back with Freddie, who she was in love with years ago and fell pregnant with – only to loose their baby following her fathers rage and physical assault that left her to miscarriage. Sylvia meets up with former housekeeper, who reveals that all the ladies who worked in the house had slept with Adam at one point. The housekeeper further reveals that she was the one who helped clean up Mack’s crime scene, before blackmailing Sylvia, reminding her that there’s more evidence for Sylvia’s accident than there is for the housekeepers involvement of cleaning up a crime scene. The housekeeper also reveals that Irene, the housekeeper before her was also killed and placed in the same spot where Mack was. As she was having an affair with Adam which Victoria had suspected. As Sylvia walks away, the housekeeper chokes on her food, but instead of rushing to help her, Sylvia decides to continue to walk away – learning her lesson from the last time she tried to help someone.
WOW, WOW, WOW, WOW, WOW! What a read! When I set out reading this book, it was my 6th read of January, so I intended for this to be my last. I think I had just short of a week and a half left before the end of the month, so I wanted this book to tie me over for the rest of the month – the plan was to slowly read it. I read this book in 4 days and that was me trying to drag it out. After each chapter, I couldn’t stop, I needed to read the next chapter, which just went on and on. I couldn’t put it down!
I’ve mentioned in pretty much every single psychological thriller book review that I’ve been searching for a book that made my heart race like Verity, and I had never found it – that was until The Wife Upstairs. Yey! I can finally stop going on about it, broken record no more.
I have to say, I was apprehensive before reading it as I’d seen people say they didn’t like it because it was too similar to Verity – despite this being published before it. I liked that it was a similar premise, but it had its own twists and turns. I’m the type of reader where if I loved a storyline, I could read the same plot over and over again, just regurgitated in a slightly different way with different character names.
I didn’t know where the story was going to go, I was expecting the same ending as Verity where you weren’t sure who to believe, but I liked that the decision was made for you and you didn’t have to think about which option you believed.
I was rooting for Victoria throughout the story, I liked her personality from her diary entries and felt a lot of sympathy for her. At times I was swayed in my decision to root for her, it went from rooting for her, to not and then to rooting for her again, as the story experienced its twists and turns. Ultimately, I rooted for her and was slightly saddened that she died, but at the same time I think I’m content with her death. Especially since Mack had died as well, if Mack had’ve been alive, I would’ve liked to have had them have their happy ending.
What I like about Freida’s writing is that in the 3 books of hers I’ve read so far, the beginnings link to the ending. I think it ties the storyline together nicely.
Although, I still have questions about Victoria’s over joyful nurse towards Sylvia and her sarcastic like enthusiasm, but I guess that was probably down to the fact she was another employee Adam had slept with.
With that, I can’t wait to read more from even Freida McFadden.
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Georgia
♥
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