Today Marshmallow reviews Dear Debbie, a psychological thriller by Frieda McFadden published in 2026.
Marshmallow’s Quick Take: If you like books about murder, revenge, and vigilante justice, then this is the book for you!
Marshmallow’s Summary (with Spoilers): Debbie Mullen might seem like a happy, contented housewife, but she has secrets far beyond what meets the eye. Like most mothers of teenagers, she is struggling to keep communication open with her two daughters, Lexi and Izzy. Lexi is a brilliant honors student senior but her boyfriend Zane is basically a stereotypical jerk. He is exactly the type of person that every parent hopes their child stays away from. So that is a bit of an issue for Debbie, as Lexi is determined to keep on seeing Zane and keep Debbie out of her life. Izzy is not as stereotypically rebellious, but she is silently hiding her problems from her parents too. Since she started playing soccer at a young age and she loves the sport with all her heart, Izzy has become one of the best players on her school’s team. Naturally, it is a bit of a shock for Debbie to learn that Izzy was kicked off the team (or possibly quit, though Izzy won’t tell her which). All of this chaos coincides with Debbie being fired from her part-time job at the local newspaper where she runs an advice column called ‘Dear Debbie’ (hence the name of the book!) Frankly, she is not having a good time.
This was not the life Debbie had imagined for herself when she was younger. With an IQ of 178 and an acceptance to MIT, she was told she would be the next Bill Gates. Unfortunately, she dropped out around halfway through for reasons she keeps hidden from everyone around her. Now, Debbie loves her family but feels under stimulated and underestimated. She keeps herself busy by maintaining an immaculate house and a lush garden, building apps every now and then, and keeping her family safe. She developed one app named Findly that allows her to track her family members (with their consent, of course, and in turn they can track her whereabouts at all times). That is how she learns that her husband is acting strange, “driving” around at night and turning off his location sharing for long periods of time. This is a cause for concern, but she also has other things to worry about, specifically, other people who she feels need to be brought to justice.
Debbie keeps a file on her laptop of secret Dear Debbie responses she wrote but never sent because they all ended with her advising the reader to take matters into their own hands in often violent ways. She decides to take her own advice and becomes somewhat of a housewife from hell. You’ll be surprised by how layered her plans are because nothing she does is unintentional.
Marshmallow’s Review: Whatever you think about Dear Debbie, it is definitely a very impressive storytelling job. I did not see the main plot twist coming at all. I saw some of the others, but not the main one! I was shocked by how everything ended up being neatly tied together. Some of it felt a tiny bit like a stretch, but it was overall extremely impressive. Frieda McFadden seems to write a lot of this type of book, with “shocking central plot twists”, and I can tell that she has gotten very very good at it.
I enjoyed reading Dear Debbie and found its plot to be stimulating; it kept you constantly guessing at what was to come. I also liked how the story was told from several different perspectives and how that style ended up concealing certain key parts that were revealed at the end in a rather fantastic manner. Debbie is a bit of a psychological case study though. She is extremely good at managing her emotions on the surface but creates karma in secret in ways that are definitely illegal.
I would like to suggest that thrillers like this may have normalized murder a bit. And this is the first book I have read written from a murderer’s perspective, so I found it very disturbing. I did not like how simply and matter-of-factly she pulled the trigger(s). I don’t think bunnies younger than fourteen should be exposed to such a blase take on death. That said, it was a good book though. The writing is very fresh and entertaining, and the characters are all created in a very well thought out way. Some are very clearly designed to be hated and they definitely do make you feel as such. All others are made to be understood as three dimensional individuals with deep nuance.
Debbie herself has a story that is slowly peeled open to show her deep seated trauma and pain. It is revealed towards the end of the book (SPOILER!!!) that she was sexually assaulted as a college student, leading to her festering anger and eventual exit from MIT. This makes Dear Debbie suddenly hold much more weight than the average psychological thriller because she represents the extremes of what can happen when a mostly normal person is pushed to the limits of what is humanly endurable.
Reading Dear Debbie is entertaining of course. But I would also recommend reading this book as a way to think about and discover the darker parts of human nature and self control. When you read about Debbie’s own sense of justice, it makes you investigate your own with more focus. I don’t think everyone she punished deserved exactly what they got, but it was definitely a book that makes you understand why hurt people hurt people. The cycle of pain is one of the most tragic parts (if not the most tragic part) of the human experience and condition. Reading books like this one makes you realize just how ingrained that process is. Only when we read and recognize such a pattern can we acknowledge its existence and work to make a truer, better form of justice based on rehabilitation and the prevention of pain in the first place. In an imperfect world like our own, Debbie’s definition of karma is naturally understandable. I just hope that one day the cycle of pain and ‘justice’ becomes something we only read about in books like this.
Marshmallow’s Rating: 98%.
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