The Locked Door by Freida McFadden

The Locked Door is another mystery/thriller that I very much enjoyed.  While it's not a perfect book, I appreciated the way it was crafted.

Certain things about the story itself remind me of A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon, which is one of my all-time favorites.  The Locked Door is no such masterpiece.  But it's a perfectly good example of what it's meant to be.  And for that, I quite like it.

It's the story of a woman, a surgeon, whose father was a serial killer called The Handyman because he'd cut his victims' hands off and keep them.

There is a lot of suspense in different ways, some of it red herrings.  There is a twist at the end that I didn't see coming.

McFadden is also a physician, so there is some medical verisimilitude that I appreciated. 

Mostly, though, I love Freida McFadden for simply staying in her lane as a writer, for doing what she's trying to do, and nothing else, right?  It's harder than it sounds until you've tried it. 

She didn't try to hammer you with all the scenic whatever of San Jose or Oregon.  She didn't go in depth on the medical aspect.  She simply wrote the book she was trying to write, told one story at a time, bang, zoom, just the facts, ma'am.  She gives you what you need to appreciate the story, no more, and no less.  Well played.

Contrast this with The Paris Apartment, by Lucy Foley.  I was so incredibly annoyed by that book I'll never read anything of hers again.  I read The Locked Door in two sittings.  It took me almost two weeks to read The Paris Apartment.

• I hated all of the phony, stuck-up characters in Paris Apartment.  None of them actually seemed like real people, except for the very two-dimensional ones like the snooty French lady with the little dog, who looks like all of those ladies in New York and Chicago, too.  Whereas all of the people in Locked Door seem realistic and almost all reasonably likeable.  I hated both the skeezer protag and her annoying Ken-doll brother in Paris Apartment.
  
  
• The red herrings in Locked Door are all on a main theme, and attributable to the psychological suspense.  In Paris Apartment, they're moronic, unrelated elements like the fact that there are protests/riots/raves going on, which is why people are dressed weirdly in the streets.  But she makes you figure that out.  There is no supernatural element to the story in PA, it's just a very old, large, European house with a bunch of alcoholic, secretive weirdos living in it.  Foley simply adds in all this other stuff for background ambience to make it all moody.  Blech.  Because  I also hated all of the characters, and then she got super preachy at the end in a way that made me want to throw my tablet at the wall.  Maybe if that had actually been a supernatural book with at least one likable person, but no.  Even the dog was a jerk.  It made me somehow not want to visit Paris.
  

But Freida McFadden hit the mark, at least for me, by writing a very effective, plain-and-simple mystery thriller with believable characters, a logical story, and a satisfying ending.  There wasn't much atmospheric description.  But the pace and flow were right on the money to keep me engaged throughout.  So she will be a go-to author for me when I'm in the market for this sort of book.