The Locked Door Review: When a Promising Thriller Fails to Deliver (Spoilers)

Score: 2/5 ⭐⭐

Review: I was unconvinced by the storyline of The Locked Door. It did not captivate my interest in the way that McFadden’s other novels have.

The premise is promising: we have a surgeon named Nora Davis, haunted by a traumatic past in which her father, Aaron Nierling, was convicted of murdering women in the basement of their family home during her childhood. However, my main issue is that The Locked Door does not carefully explore why her father became a serial killer in the first place. This is similar to the issue I had with McFadden’s The Housemaid (spoilers!), where we are not given a detailed explanation for why Andrew Winchester brutally abuses his wife, Nina.

Source: Amazon

The problem is that shocking and disturbing scenes are presented throughout the novel but shock value alone does not necessarily motivate the reader to remain invested in the story.

The Real Murderer: Why the Twist Lacked Impact

It turns out that Harper, Nora’s assistant, is the real murderer. This twist is revealed only at the very end of the novel. We are expected to believe that Harper was placed for adoption by Nora’s grandmother before Nora’s mother committed suicide. Harper eventually made contact with Nora’s father in prison and decided to continue his crimes in order to prove that she was a more worthy daughter than Nora.

While this revelation is certainly grotesque, the ending is not particularly satisfying. Nor are readers truly misled in a compelling way before the final reveal. Elements such as humour, relatability, or emotional investment appear largely absent from the novel. Instead, the story drags through a series of uneventful scenes while the motivations of Aaron Nierling remain largely unexplored and underdeveloped.

For me, this is the novel’s greatest weakness. It is one thing to depict murder or brutality, but it is another to convincingly explain the motivations behind such horrific acts. Without that psychological depth, many of the novel’s most shocking moments feel more sensational than meaningful.