Freida McFadden’s thrillers have been topping the bestseller charts for years. The Intruder, which was published in October 2025, is at number thirteen on Amazon’s domestic thriller bestsellers chart as I write this on May 18, 2026. Altogether, McFadden’s novels occupy nine of the top fifteen slots on the list, including all of the top three. Let’s find out what tools and techniques she’s using to hook readers, keep them turning pages, and bring them back for new stories again and again.
As always, I like to start with an analysis of the all-important opener. Particularly in this category, an author needs to deliver the hook—there’s little room in a thriller for a slow opening. (However, an established author writing a thriller with a more literary slant can sometimes still hit the bestseller list with a slower open; Tana French’s The Searcher is one example.) In the case of The Intruder, the title itself does a lot of work: Who is going to intrude on whose house, and what will happen when they do? If you read the book description—and I think most thriller readers do—then you’ll come to page one with even more information: the intruder is a young girl who is alone and “covered in blood.” To add to the tension, the setting is a remote cabin on the eve of a fierce storm and the girl, the book description tells us, has a “dark secret” she’ll “kill to keep.”
Even for readers who don’t read the description, the title alone gives McFadden some room in her opening chapters to introduce her protagonist Casey, insert some backstory mysteries, and add further sources of ‘frontstory’ tension before, at the end of chapter three, Casey sees “a pale face” staring at her through the window. McFadden leaves that staring face as a cliff-hanger, jumping backward in time to a new narrator, Ella. Let’s examine each of these first four chapters more closely to see the work each one is doing.
Chapter 1: Establishing antagonists & backstory mysteries
Here are the first two sentences of the novel:
There is at least a fifty percent chance that in the next twenty-four hours, the roof of the cabin I'm renting will collapse and kill me. It's an apt metaphor for the rest of my life.
McFadden starts by leaning into the dark-and-stormy night of it all. As we’ll see, she enjoys directing winking attention to her use of common thriller tropes; later in the chapter, Casey wishes she could afford “a decent isolated shack in the woods.” But the shack is indeed isolated and the storm is real, which represents the first potential antagonist Casey must face. The second sentence introduces a backstory mystery: Why has Casey’s life collapsed? McFadden doesn’t give us more details right away; we know there is a story here, but she’s going to make us wait to get it.
What comes next is the introduction of another antagonist. After much cajoling, Casey’s landlord Rudy shows up to look at the roof; he didn’t bring his tools, only the dismissive pronouncement that Casey worries too much. McFadden isn’t starting with her intensity dial set to 5, but she does play with readers’ hopes and expectations. Is the roof problem going to be solved? Oh, it’s not, and also Rudy is an additional problem. Soon after, McFadden introduces yet another problem in the form of an unstable tree that could fall on the house.
Underneath the push-pull of the conversation between Casey and Rudy, McFadden layers a few more hints about Casey’s past. As we’ll see when I analyze the structure of the novel as a whole, McFadden excels at doling out information in a way that maximizes both suspense and surprise. This tricky skill is necessary for thriller and mystery authors but also useful for writers of any genre because readers love to be surprised.
However, as Tiffany Yates Martin has pointed out, readers can’t be in suspense about something they don’t know about. The second sentence of the novel alerts us that the mystery exists. On the next page we get one more crumb of information: Casey moved to this remote cabin after she lost her teaching job. And on the page after that, we get this bit of interiority:
I wish I were anywhere else but here. I especially wish I were back in Boston, in front of my classroom. I miss my students. I would have done anything for those kids. Except that's what got me into trouble.
Here, McFadden doles out a tiny hint about why Casey was fired, but it serves only to heighten our curiosity rather than slake it. What does “anything” mean? If a character has a significant incident in their past that you want to reveal much later in the book, the solution is to have them think about it, which feels natural, but do so only obliquely. Position the interior reflection with the thought in the midst of a scene like this one where a new dialogue line or action can change the attention of the POV character and, with it, the attention of the reader.
Chapter 2: Delivering a surprise, establishing a theme, and setting up a later payoff
When we turn the page to chapter two, readers might be surprised, as I was, to find that we are still outside the house with Casey, who is still talking to Rudy. But McFadden, known for her short chapters, knows that a chapter break here adds the feeling of momentum to a scene. And she takes the opportunity to end the previous chapter with a ‘resonator’ rather than a cliff-hanger—another hint about why Casey considers her life to be in about as good a shape as that roof. If she dies tonight, she thinks, “the good news is that nobody will miss me.”
When the conversation with Rudy resumes on the other side of the chapter break, Casey has accepted that the problems presented by the roof and the tree aren’t getting fixed today, but she soon has another problem. Rudy suggests, with a “hungry grin,” that she just spend the night at his place. No sooner does he put an arm around her than Casey has him on the ground, his arm twisted behind him. The jolt of action changes the power dynamic between Rudy and Casey, especially as she twists his arm “for another few beats,” seriously considering breaking it, even after he promises never to touch her again and to fix her roof. We begin to wonder just what Casey might be capable of. McFadden also uses this opportunity to introduce a recurring theme—that of present and absent fathers, and parents in general. This is just the first of many references to things Casey’s father taught her. After she releases Rudy, the final beats of the chapter raise the tension once more when Casey wonders if he’ll find an opportunity for revenge and reminds herself, “that’s what my gun is for.”
In roughly a thousand words, McFadden accomplishes quite a lot: She sets up a cause-and-effect sequence around the confrontation and a possible retaliation, she demonstrates that Casey is capable of inflicting pain, she introduces the key theme of parental care and neglect, and she sets up her Chekhov’s gun, ready for a later payoff.
Chapter 3: The quiet before the cliff-hanger
The purpose of chapter three is to end on a cliff-hanger, the first of many of the novel, and it’s the one readers have been waiting for: the first sight of the titular intruder. But McFadden is again playing a delaying game. If that cliff-hanger has to be at the end for maximum impact, how does she keep us entertained until we get there? In the previous chapter, she used surprise. In this one, she uses curiosity, introducing two new story questions for us to wonder about, in addition to more setting details as Casey tours first the yard and then the house to make sure everything is ready for the impending storm.
The first story question comes when Casey spots “a glint of something in the corner of the shed” as she is storing her lawn mower. She dismisses the glint as “probably some sort of old gardening tool” and decides to investigate later, giving seasoned thriller readers a chance to yell at the book since we know this is a bad decision. What is in the shed, Casey‽ Back inside the house, the tension lowers a bit as Casey reinforces her windows with duct tape (another setup with a later payoff). While she’s in her bedroom, we get a chunk of interiority about her love of sleeping alone, and we get our second story question of the chapter—Casey’s suspicion that “there’s one other person” who would be happy to spend the night in her bed. Who is it? The low temperature of the interiority gives extra punch to the closing cliff-hanger: “There’s a pale face staring at me from outside my window.”
Chapter 4: Introducing a new narrator and chronology to keep the cliff hanging
When we turn the page to find out what happens next, we are greeted with the headings “BEFORE” and “ELLA,” and we understand right away that there is at least one more chapter between us and the resolution of that cliff-hanger. McFadden also takes advantage of our curiosity to do quite a lot of setup work in the intervening pages. The action of the chapter is fairly quiet. Middle schooler Ella is given detention for stealing another kid’s lunch; on her way out of the principal’s office, she encounters fellow students Anton and Brittany.
Instead of action, McFadden delivers detailed character portraits of these three students, especially Ella. In the span of just two pages we learn that Ella has been branded a troublemaker, perhaps unfairly because she clearly has problems at home, including being underfed, and that, in her middle school ecosystem, Anton is the bad boy antagonist and Brittany is the golden girl object of envy. We see Ella lie to the principal about having enough food at home but tell him the truth that their fridge is so full “you literally couldn’t even fit anything else in it.” McFadden gets two things out of this brief exchange. First, a new story question: Why is Ella going hungry when her fridge is full of food? And second, an alliance between Ella and the reader. Paradoxically, having Ella admit in her narration when she is lying makes us more prone to believe her when she says she’s telling the truth.
Most importantly, the POV shift in this chapter leads us to make some assumptions about how this Ella strand links to the Casey chapters. We know from the book description that the intruder turns out to be a “young girl”—this must be her, we think. Positioning this chapter just after Casey’s glimpse of the “pale face” only confirms the guess. Are we right? You’ll have to read the book—or my forthcoming post on the structure of the novel as a whole—to find out.
Takeaways
McFadden delays the expected inciting incident (seeing the intruder) and avoids resolving a cliff-hanger by redirecting our attention: setting up other antagonists (the storm, Rudy), offering a minor surprise (Casey easily dominating Rudy), seeding more story questions (what’s Casey capable of? why was she fired? what’s in the shed?), and shifting POVs.
The opening four chapters build multiple intersecting story questions—we aren’t just interested in the intruder any longer.
Through setup and payoff and cause-and-effect, each chapter moves the plot forward, while providing interim resolutions along the way. For example: Casey disarms the immediate threat from Rudy but may have given him the motivation to cause greater harm later in the novel.
No spoilers in the comments, please! If you want to discuss the full plot of the novel, you can do so at the all-the-spoilers discussion post.
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