The Intruder By Freida McFadden

‘The Intruder’ is the latest book by Freida McFadden.

Casey’s cabin in the wilderness is not built for a hurricane. Her roof shakes, the lights flicker, and the tree outside her front door sways ominously in the wind. But she’s a lot more worried about the girl she discovers lurking outside her kitchen window. She’s young. She’s alone. And she’s covered in blood. The girl won’t explain where she came from, or loosen her grip on the knife in her right hand. And when Casey makes a disturbing discovery in the middle of the night, things take a turn for the worse. The girl has a dark secret. One she’ll kill to keep. And if Casey gets too close to the truth, she may not live to see the morning.

I’ve spent the last two nights gripped to the latest thriller by Freida McFadden and boy, did she deliver with this story.

Frieda is a relatively new author for me, even though she is fairly new on the book scene, she has quite a books under her belt which I discovered only a couple of months ago. I first read ‘The Tenant’ by her and very quickly, I was reading three books a week by the author. Her books are action packed, fast paced and just when you think you’ve figured it out, it all unravels before your very eyes and ‘The Intruder’ is no different.

The story is seen from the perspective of teenage girl Ella and woman Casey. The past sequences are through Ella’s eyes, a lonely teenager who lives with her mother. An absolutely horrible woman who hoards every space in the house, treat Ella’s terribly and makes the young girl feel inadequate and alone. She locks Ella in the closet when she goes out and these scenes make for tense and claustrophobic reading. The present tense is seen from Casey, who lives alone in a cabin in the woods and is preparing for a terrible storm, but she gets more than just her electricity going out when Ella turns up at her door.

The chapters alternate between both women and like all Freida books, I was on my toes throughout, trying to guess where it was going but still Freida managed to surprise me along the way, with cleverly crafted storytelling and characters that you feel a strong sense of empathy for. Between the scenes in the closet and the lonely cabin in the woods, there’s an awful sense of isolation in the story and this theme continues to flow through the story almost until you reach the final page.

Tense from the first page, with more twist and turns than you can ever imagine. A story of desperation and endurance, ‘The Intruder’ is a fantastic thriller from Freida that has left me bursting for more books by the author.

You can buy ‘The Intruder’ from Amazon and is available to buy from good bookshops.