The Divorce by Freida McFadden — A Locked Door, a Younger Woman and Three Stories That Don't Agree

Naomi comes home with her young son, Teddy, and her keys no longer work. Her husband, Jeremy, has an explanation ready. He changed the locks because contractors are working on the house, and the family will stay for now in his late parents' apartment. It sounds almost reasonable. Then the divorce papers arrive. Then Naomi sees Jeremy with a much younger woman. The Divorce, published by Poisoned Pen Press on 26 May 2026, follows Freida McFadden's Dear Debbie, published in January. McFadden, a practising doctor and the author of The Housemaid series, has built a huge readership on short chapters, unreliable narrators and twists designed to make you go back and reread. This book has all three. A familiar story, at first The opening is deliberately ordinary. A woman in a comfortable Long Island life is pushed out of her marriage and her home, and finds that her husband has hired the most powerful divorce lawyers in the area. Naomi tries to save the marriage, then tries to fight back, and grows more and more desperate as her options narrow. That set-up will be familiar to anyone who has read domestic suspense, and it's meant to be. McFadden lets you settle into a story you think you know before she starts taking it apart. Three narrators, no safe ground The book's main device is perspective. The story moves between Naomi, Jeremy and Veronica, the younger woman in Jeremy's life, and each of them sees events very differently. As Kirkus pointed out, any or all of them may be unreliable, so the question isn't just what happened but who is telling the truth, and who is the real victim. The effect is cumulative. Naomi's chapters invite sympathy for a woman being pushed out of her own life. Each new voice then fills gaps in her version and opens new ones, so you keep revising who you trust. Publishers Weekly described the switching perspectives as gradually exposing the toxic roots of the marriage, and that's the best way to read it: less as a mystery about one event than as a slow reveal of what this marriage really was. There is also a prologue: a tense, unexplained scene that the rest of the book slowly works towards. Without giving anything away, a major shift partway through changes how the story looks. Ray Palen, reviewing for Bookreporter on 29 May 2026, called that shift "insanely clever" and advised readers to avoid spoilers before reaching it. Where reviewers split Reactions depend on how much you enjoy McFadden at full volume. Palen found the book impossible to put down. Kirkus enjoyed its dark, escalating twists and singled out a confrontation at a child's birthday party as a highlight, summing it up as an "over-the-top tale of deception and revenge". Publishers Weekly was far less impressed. Its unsigned review found the twists far-fetched and poorly motivated, the characters increasingly unhinged, and the whole thing "more exhausting than entertaining". If you've ever finished a McFadden novel feeling the last third went too far, this may be one of those books for you. Dear Debbie or The Divorce? These two 2026 McFadden novels both deal with marriages falling apart, but they're very different reads. Dear Debbie is a dark comedy with one gleefully vengeful narrator. The Divorce is a darker, more traditional psychological thriller that keeps you guessing about whose version of events to believe. If you prefer humour, choose the first. If you want to be misled, choose this one. Bottom line The Divorce is McFadden doing what she does best: taking a familiar situation and turning it inside out. The first half is a tense, well-paced domestic drama. The second half will either thrill you or wear you out, depending on how many twists you can take. Read it in a single sitting if you can, and don't look anything up first. The less you know, the better it works.