Last updated on November 4th, 2025 at 10:30 am
Infertility, trust, and ambition collide—and then someone dies, leaving a working couple trapped in a tightening net of suspicion and lies. This psychological thriller asks a brutal question: what would you trade for a child when the world keeps saying “no”? By the time the cuffs click, even you aren’t sure whom to believe. The Surrogate Mother by Freida McFadden shows how the longing to build a family—after failed adoptions and dashed hopes—can make smart people overlook obvious danger, and how love becomes leverage in the wrong hands.
From the startling prologue (“I will be arrested for first-degree murder.”) to the detectives’ pressure tactics and planted evidence, McFadden layers credible stakes with procedural menace and domestic dread.
The Surrogate Mother is best for readers who love psychological thriller twists, morally gray protagonists, and office-turned-crime-scene tension. Not for readers seeking cozy mysteries, feel-good surrogacy stories, or tidy morality tales; this one is acidic, contemporary, and sharp-edged.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
McFadden’s The Surrogate Mother is a psychological thriller first released independently in 2018 and now in print with Poisoned Pen Press; the author is a practicing physician known for brisk, twisty domestic noirs.
The novel opens with a gut-punch: “I will be arrested for first-degree murder,” Abby says in the prologue, shattering any illusion of safety and establishing the book’s relentless forward motion. McFadden’s medical background and work ethic—she writes while practicing brain-injury medicine—are well documented and help explain her taut, clinical pacing.
Recent UK/US trade listings confirm the book’s wide availability in 2025 paperback and audio, which has helped revive conversation around this earlier title for new readers of The Housemaid.
As a psychological thriller, The Surrogate Mother by Freida McFadden leverages claustrophobic workplaces, fragile marriages, and the ethics of surrogacy to generate dread.
2. Background
Set in contemporary New York advertising and domestic spaces, the novel taps into surrogacy’s complex cultural moment: higher maternal age, falling fertility rates, and the booming market for assisted reproduction.
While the book is fiction, it resonates with real-world numbers: the CDC reports 3.59 million U.S. births in 2023 (down 2% year-over-year), and historical estimates suggest tens of thousands of U.S. surrogate pregnancies since the late 1990s; readers feel that demographic pressure on Abby and Sam.
3. The Surrogate Mother Summary
Abby Adler is a high-performing New York ad executive whose life is split cleanly in two: the part where she is trusted to land the “Cuddles” baby-food campaign and the part where she is about to be arrested for first-degree murder.
The novel opens with Abby sitting in a defense attorney’s office, told bluntly that the police have “a pretty solid case” and that if this goes to court, she’ll be convicted; in her own words, “in the next twenty-four hours, I will be arrested for first-degree murder.”
From there the book folds back through the prior months—how a failed adoption pushed Abby and her husband, Sam, toward surrogacy; how Abby’s new assistant, Monica Johnson, became more than a right hand at the office; and how a corporate power struggle bled into Abby’s personal life.
We watch Abby at work: Denise Holt, her ice-cold boss, scrutinizes everything from the crumbs on the floor to Abby’s performance, while a marquee pitch with “Cuddles” stutters—saved, almost humiliatingly, by a line Monica plucks from Abby’s own reject list: “Cuddles Baby Food—because your baby deserves the best.” Denise beams at Monica as a “rising star,” and the room’s center of gravity tilts away from Abby.
Domestically, Abby and Sam are reeling; after years of infertility, they had a near-adoption that fell apart. Abby, who once dreamed of a nursery, now trains herself to say all the practical things about adopting an older child.
Monica listens, almost too intently, and gently floats the “what about a surrogate?” prompt. At this stage, even the idea of someone else carrying Sam’s child for Abby feels like a moral and emotional Rubicon—especially because the egg and uterus would be the surrogate’s own. Abby says they’ve “moved past that,” but the ache is still raw.
But then lines blur. Monica, unwaveringly competent and eager, becomes indispensable at the office and sympathetic in private. When an office baby shower appears (ironically celebrating adoption, not pregnancy), Monica is right there—hauling an absurd “diaper cake” from the client, joking with Abby, mirroring her mannerisms, and, crucially, basking in Abby’s approval.
Abby tells us she hired Monica “on the spot” after an interview that felt like meeting a younger version of herself; the narration admits how much Abby’s efficiency has increased with Monica around—“sixty-eight percent,” Abby quips—and how similar they look: same jet-black hair, same eager smile.
Soon after, a line is formally crossed: Abby and Sam sign a tight surrogacy contract with Monica—tuition for Monica’s graduate school in exchange for all parental rights relinquished at conception.
Sam insists the medical steps be done properly at a clinic; on the very first try, Monica is pregnant with Sam’s child, a fact Abby receives with a dizzying mix of elation (“I’m going to be a mother”) and a small, unignorable sting when Monica says, “I guess I’m really fertile, huh?”
What follows is a steady tightening of screws. Abby starts missing appointments that matter; she’s shown as fallible at work; and, worst, her drug tests at the office come back dirty for methamphetamines. Abby is bewildered—she is meticulous, risk-averse, and vehemently sober—but someone seems to be poisoning her reputation and, possibly, her body.
Denise, never a fan of Abby’s “personal drama,” seizes on this failure and puts Abby on the defensive. Meanwhile, Monica thrives publicly—offering the perfect slogan at the perfect time, smoothing meetings, earning Denise’s overt praise. Abby’s career craters. Denise fires her. The police soon want to talk.
Detective Sweeney takes the case when Denise Holt is found dead. The instrument? A letter opener engraved “ABBY,” which Abby thought she had misplaced weeks prior. In interrogation, Sweeney points out that Adderall (found in Monica’s desk, per Denise) wouldn’t explain a methamphetamine-positive urine screen, implicitly undercutting Abby’s poisoning theory.
Sweeney also presses the gap between Abby’s story (“Denise called me to discuss tampered drug tests”) and the lack of independent verification beyond Abby’s phone log—raising the specter that whatever Denise told Abby can’t be corroborated now that Denise is dead.
The tone of the questioning slides from skeptical to predatory: “You are going to go to jail for this—I guarantee it. But if you confess now, maybe we can work out a deal.” Abby asks for a lawyer.
On the personal front, the paranoia metastasizes. Abby begins to wonder if Sam—handsome math professor, accustomed to adoring undergrads—has been having an affair with Monica. It seems unthinkable; then a detail knocks her breathless: Monica’s mother mentions her daughter once dating a math professor named Sam, and the timeline would stretch back years.
Abby reels. She pictures the “ratty couch” in Sam’s office—how convenient a setting that would be—and wonders if Monica, now carrying his baby, was never a helper but a co-architect of a long con that included sabotaging a prior adoption and nudging Abby out of the way. Her thoughts spiral: the calendar “mistakes,” the mysterious drugs, the “crystals of meth” Sam supposedly found; even the engraved letter opener, a gift from Sam, now feels like a planted murder weapon.
And yet, even while the dots line up too neatly, Abby stops herself: to believe this is to accept that Sam is a psychopath capable of framing his wife for murder; she has known him for a decade and cannot truly make that square.
At the office, the scandal detonates publicly. Human Resources (Sonia) calls Abby and Denise into a conference room where Monica, now visibly pregnant, sits in her first maternity top. Sonia announces that the company has become aware of an “arrangement” in which Monica is acting as a surrogate for Abby, and that this raises issues of coercion and impropriety given their employment relationship.
Denise—who “hates pregnant ladies and children” in Abby’s barbed description—presses the moral accusation: “How could you force Monica to do something like this, Abigail?”
At the breaking point, Monica intervenes—calmly saying it was her idea and that she had an attorney review the contracts. For a heartbeat, Abby thinks she might keep her job after all. The reprieve doesn’t last.
The murder occurs fast and grim. Abby is summoned to the building; she finds Denise’s body and, in her panic, triggers the worst optics imaginable. The letter opener engraved with “ABBY” becomes the crown jewel of the case against her; the detectives’ narrative is neat: she was fired, she blamed Denise, she had the weapon.
Sweeney dangles pleas and time-limited deals in a classic “confess now” script, underlining the gulf between what Abby knows—or thinks she knows—and what she can prove. After a long night of questioning, Abby emerges from the precinct to find Sam waiting, his face emptied out, still present, still hers… or not.
The middle third of the book weaponizes uncertainty. Is Monica the single-source saboteur—poisoning coffee, switching calendars, downloading threatening emails from Abby’s account to make her look unhinged? Abby suddenly realizes Monica once had access to her work email; if someone sent “threatening words” from Abby’s account, Monica could have done it.
But Sweeney keeps undercutting easy answers: Adderall ≠ meth; “why didn’t Denise go to HR?” Each time Abby thinks the picture has resolved, it tilts.
McFadden also keeps the domestic stakes organ-deep. This is not merely a woman’s career or reputation; it is literally the future of a hoped-for child. In a fraught exchange, Sam insists that this isn’t “just a regular adoption,” snapping “My kid. This is half my DNA,” as if biology grants him singular veto power; Abby firmly says “our kid.” Even here, trust is a battlefield.
The final reveals and the denouement harden the book’s cynicism. The precise mechanical spoilers that lead to the killer’s unmasking are built from those seeded details—who had physical access to what (letter opener, coffee, desk drawers), who had digital access (work email), and who had motive: anger, ambition, and leverage over Abby’s deepest grief.
Without reheating every interrogatory beat, the resolution implicates the domestic triangle and the workplace pecking order in a pattern of manipulation that makes Abby’s downfall look methodical rather than accidental. Abby survives legally, but only just; she returns to a life that is quieter, reduced, and forever booby-trapped by scent and memory.
That last point is literal. In the epilogue, time has passed. Abby and Sam have a toddler son, David. A visitor drops off a yellow blanket that once belonged to Monica. The odor of Monica’s lavender perfume still clings to it. Sam recoils and tells Abby to “get rid of it.” But when Abby tries to toss it in the trash, David wails “Banka!”—his sweet baby-word for “blanket.”
Abby relents and lets him keep it, telling herself he will lose interest in a day. The image that closes the novel is David burying his face in that blanket, inhaling the lingering scent of the woman whose presence detonated their lives. “THE END.” It reads like a curse disguised as a comfort object, the past made plush and permanent.
How the ending explains the whole design. The book’s structure—beginning with the promised arrest—trains you to see every kindness as a setup. Monica’s “help” at work doesn’t just upstage Abby in front of clients; it places Monica in every room where incriminating objects and words can be planted.
The HR scene, staged so that Abby looks like a predator exploiting her subordinate, pre-sours any future defense Abby might mount. Denise’s dislike of pregnancy and Abby’s “personal life” makes her the perfect victim (and the perfect vector for suspicion): a boss who would “swing the ax” when drug tests came back dirty, who had recently humiliated Abby, who could plausibly have been the target of rage.
And if the letter opener engraved “ABBY” turns up in a dead woman’s body, what jury won’t at least wonder?
Where the moral weight lands. McFadden doesn’t redeem surrogacy as noble sacrifice; she weaponizes it. The arrangement is “very strict,” drafted like a fortress to keep emotions out, and yet emotions pour in through every seam—jealousy, desperation, shame.
When Monica announces her pregnancy with two blue lines in a Ziploc bag on Abby’s desk, the scene is both miracle and indictment: proof that Sam’s DNA works fine, proof that Abby’s does not. The book’s late chapters exploit that asymmetry—Sam’s intermittent, self-protective distance; Abby’s fear that even the lawyer he found is shepherding her toward a plea; the nagging sense that biology has translated into leverage.
Why the blanket matters. In thrillers, the last object is rarely random. Abby and Sam’s world is quieter, but Monica’s lavender scent survives, distilled in fibers their son clutches. The epilogue doesn’t restore equilibrium; it preserves unease.
Even if Abby navigated away from a conviction (the book’s final pages imply she is free and mothering), the family carries a relic of the woman who nearly unmade them—kept in their home because the child they love demands it. It’s cruel and perfect: memory domesticated, trauma laundered, but never gone.
In one breath, the plot’s essential arc:
- Abby Adler, an ad exec struggling with infertility and a collapsed adoption, hires Monica Johnson, a mirror-image assistant who quickly becomes indispensable.
- Abby and Sam sign a rigorous surrogacy contract with Monica; on the first attempt, Monica is pregnant with Sam’s child, and Abby experiences whiplash elation.
- At work, Monica shines while Abby starts to falter; Denise Holt, Abby’s severe boss, humiliates and then fires her, especially after drug tests come back dirty in a way Abby cannot explain.
- Denise is found murdered with a letter opener engraved “ABBY,” and Detective Sweeney methodically pulls Abby toward a confession, casting doubt on Abby’s poisoning theory and emphasizing circumstantial evidence.
- Abby suspects Monica and even Sam, especially after learning Monica once had a romance with a math professor named Sam; her mind assembles a three-year affair and a conspiracy to push Abby out—yet she cannot truly believe her husband is a murderer who would frame her.
- The legal thread resolves without Abby’s dramatic confession; life moves forward in a diminished register. In the epilogue, their toddler clings to Monica’s old yellow blanket, still scented with lavender—an object that makes clear the past still lives in the house. “THE END.”
Specific clarification of the feel of the ending: McFadden chooses an aftermath over a courtroom climax. The novel’s opening promise—“arrested for first-degree murder”—pays off in anxiety, interrogation, and near-ruin rather than a full trial narrative; the emotional verdict is that Abby can never fully insulate her family from what happened. The yellow blanket, infused with Monica’s perfume, does the thematic lifting: a child’s comfort tethered to the source of the parents’ terror. Sam wants it gone; Abby tries; David wails. The family keeps the past because love compels it to, and the reader understands that some ghosts we do not exorcise—we tuck them in.
Five emblematic moments that carry the plot:
- The opening declaration of doom in the lawyer’s office—stakes defined in a single page.
- The maternity top in the conference room and Sonia’s HR reveal—Monica as publicly validated surrogate, Abby as alleged coercer.
- The engraved letter opener—an intimate gift transformed into a murder weapon.
- The “confess now” gambit in interrogation—state power versus a panicked civilian.
- The epilogue’s blanket—love and residue intertwined, a soft object with a sharp meaning.
4. The Surrogate Mother Analysis
4.1. The Surrogate Mother Characters
Abby (our narrator) is competent, ambitious, and vulnerable—fresh from a failed adoption when her new assistant Monica appears to be the solution she’s been waiting for, not a fuse. “About… the adoption falling through. I’m so sorry,” Abby’s former assistant says, a line that quietly primes the novel’s core wound.
Sam, the well-meaning husband, is drawn with a humane softness: he apologizes for small betrayals (“It was a mistake… I felt like an asshole.”), but those micro-fractures widen under stress.
Monica, the assistant, is the spark—professionally competent, disarmingly helpful, and possibly dangerous; the novel hints at calculated ambition (a colleague’s hip “felt like a push,” the kind of throwaway detail that curdles in hindsight).
The most memorable supporting character is Denise Holt, Abby’s career-idol-turned-adversary; when Abby finds Denise’s body, the book’s domestic suspense merges with a full-on murder investigation. “I shake her… and that’s when I see all the blood.”
Across these arcs, The Surrogate Mother by Freida McFadden keeps character motivations ambiguous, nudging readers to second-guess every ally and every alibi.
4.2. The Surrogate Mother Themes and Symbolism
Ambition vs. intimacy powers the book: Abby’s triumphant pitch to “Cuddles” diapers (“We’re going to crush it.”) undercuts the maternal idyll, showing how career success and baby-longing can coexist—and clash.
Surrogacy as leverage is the master theme; after “years of failed infertility treatments and adoptions,” Abby’s desire becomes a vulnerability predatory people can exploit, from doctored emails to weaponized office politics. (bookreporter.com)
Evidence-as-symbol is everywhere: the letter opener engraved “ABBY” functions like a Chekhovian prop—intimate, personalized, and catastrophically misread.
The yellow blanket in the final pages—scented with Monica’s perfume—works as lingering contagion; the past remains in the room, literally clutched by a child who has no idea what he’s holding.
Read this way, The Surrogate Mother by Freida McFadden becomes a fable about how our most intimate hopes can be reverse-engineered into traps.
5. Evaluation
Strengths (pleasant/positive): McFadden’s pacing is ruthless, the stakes personal, and the set pieces sticky: the interrogation (“If you confess now, maybe we can work out a deal.”) and the late-night release scene with Sam waiting glassy-eyed are particularly strong.
Weaknesses (negative): The twist mechanics occasionally rely on coincidence, and some readers may find the villain’s access a bit convenient (email, planted object, stairwell “accident”)—though genre fans will forgive it for the momentum and payoff.
Impact: I finished with my shoulders tight and my sympathies scrambled; like Abby in the prologue, I felt the walls inch closer with each chapter, unsure if the next reveal would save her—or sink her.
Comparison with similar works: Fans of Shari Lapena’s domestic entrapments and Lisa Jewell’s identity puzzles will recognize the rhythm; McFadden’s signature, honed across bestsellers, is a cleaner line and a faster cut, supported by her physician’s eye for cause-and-effect.
Adaptation: There’s no confirmed film or TV adaptation of The Surrogate Mother as of this writing; McFadden’s The Housemaid is in active film production, which signals Hollywood appetite for her brand of twist-forward suspense—but Surrogate hasn’t been announced, and thus has no box office figures.
6. Personal Insight
What landed hardest for me—beyond the shocks—was the book’s realism about fertility grief and how institutions (employers, police, even friends) can distort the truth when you’re most fragile; that aligns with broader demographic pressures around delayed parenthood, declining birth rates, and complex reproductive choices.
For readers, there’s an educational angle: learn to interrogate channels of control—who can log in to your accounts, touch your desk, or see your schedule—because in Abby’s world, an email, a trinket, or a “favor” can be the difference between safety and being “arrested for first-degree murder.”
Want to widen the lens? The CDC’s 2025 natality report summarizes U.S. birth trends with precise, updated context; McFadden’s plot doesn’t cite stats, but it hums with the same pressure curve those tables describe. (See the CDC’s NVSR Vol. 74, No. 1; Reuters also captured the broad trend.)
7. The Surrogate Mother Quotes
“I will be arrested for first-degree murder.”
“If you confess now, maybe we can work out a deal.”
“It’s a letter opener… With the name ‘ABBY’ engraved on it.”
“About… the adoption falling through. I’m so sorry.”
“We’re going to crush it.”
8. Conclusion
The Surrogate Mother by Freida McFadden is a lean, mean domestic thriller that weaponizes longing and turns every kindness into a clue.
I recommend it to readers who loved The Housemaid or domestic noirs where the home, the office, and the inbox are all crime scenes; if you need purely uplifting depictions of surrogacy or crystal-clear moral lines, steer elsewhere. Its significance? It reframes surrogacy—usually discussed as policy, medicine, or miracle—as a psychological battlefield where hope is both motive and misdirection.
Read also: The Tenant and The Intruder by Freida McFadden