If you loved The Housemaid, read The Restoration
What they share
Both novels begin with a woman who needs a job too badly to ask the right questions. Millie has a past that would end her chances anywhere else; Clara Reyes has a forgery in her history and a debt that grows faster than she can pay it. Both accept a position inside a wealthy household that comes with rules, a beautiful home that feels wrong from the first night, and a family whose private life is not hers to see. The engine is the same slow squeeze: the money is too good to walk away from, and every day inside the house makes leaving harder.
Where The Restoration goes its own way
Clara isn't there to clean. She has been hired to restore a 400-year-old Italian fresco, and the painting itself becomes the clue: figures appear on the wall that were never there before. The house is also smarter than any locked door. Every door at Aldercroft opens to a thumbprint and records who passed through it. And the man who hired her is not cold or cruel. Arthur Voss is gentle, patient, and always kind, which may be the most frightening thing about him.
Read it if you like
Live-in jobs with strange rules, a wealthy couple hiding something, a heroine with a past she can't afford to have exposed, and a slow burn that tightens into a trap.