The Locked Door

The Locked Door is a psychological thriller by the American writer Freida McFadden, published in 2021. It belongs to the very large family of novels in which the killer is close to home and the heroine has a family history she cannot escape.

Nora Davis was eleven years old and upstairs doing her homework when the police came to the house. She had no idea until that moment that her father had been killing women in the basement, and decades later he is serving his sentence while she has become a successful surgeon with a quiet, solitary existence.

Nobody knows whose daughter she is, and she means to keep it that way. Then one of Nora's young female patients is found murdered, in the same distinctive manner her father used on his victims, and the life she has built begins to come apart. The novel sets the reader to work on the question of who could possibly know what her father did, and whether the answer is closer to her than she thinks.