🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Dear Debbie yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Meet Debbie. On the surface she looks completely fine. She’s a suburban housewife who bakes, writes an advice column for the local paper, and smiles at the neighbours. But underneath that? Debbie is keeping score. She has been for a while. And she is absolutely, thoroughly done.
The Full Summary — Spoilers Included
Debbie’s World
Let’s start with the list of people making Debbie’s life a daily exercise in restraint, because it is long and it is impressive.
Her daughters treat her like she is beneath them. Lexi is seventeen and openly contemptuous in a way that crosses every line. Her other daughter Izzy just got cut from the soccer team and refuses to tell her mother why, or that she got cut at all — Lexi is the one who told her. Debbie respects Izzy’s wishes and gives her space. Ha. Just kidding. Debbie shows up at the school with a plate of brownies and bribes Coach Pike to get the real story. What does Coach Pike tell her? That Izzy is too slow. And then that Izzy should lose a good twenty pounds — that’s the real reason she is too slow right? And because “people don’t want to watch a bunch of chubby girls running around the field.”
Then there is neighbour Brett. Aggressive, loud music at all hours, and convinced that Debbie is the one who broke into his house and messed with his fuse box, which is apparently costing him thousands to fix. He yells all of this at her on the front lawn. Just full-volume accusations in front of the whole street.
And then the magazine. Debbie had arranged a photo shoot for her garden, waited all morning, and the photographer never came, no one calls. She calls to find out what happened and is told they went to her neighbour Joe’s house instead, because Joe’s roses were nicer. Joe, for her part, does not feel even slightly bad about this. In fact, she takes pride in having stolen the shoot. This woman is pleased with herself.
Then there is the book club. The women are insufferable, snobbish, and constantly putting Debbie down for not having a college education. They are quietly building a case to kick her out of the group entirely. Debbie invites Harley, her personal trainer friend from the gym, and Debbie makes the sandwiches for the meeting. And every single one of those snobbish women ends up violently sick. Coincidentally, they had an event that night that Debbie was not invited to. Funny how that works.
And then there is Cooper. Her husband, who Debbie has been encouraging to go in and finally ask his firm for the partnership his boss had mentioned when Cooper started there ten years ago. Cooper goes in, has the meeting, gets told no. So he does the thing where he bluffs a resignation, fully expecting his boss to backpedal. “Consider this my two weeks.” The boss accepts it. Cooper is stunned. He comes home and does not even tell Debbie the full story yet, just that the partnership is not happening.
On top of everything else, Debbie loses her job. She writes an advice column for the local newspaper, and one of her recent columns had a woman writing in about her husband’s financial abuse. Debbie’s advice was to leave. The woman did. And now the husband is furious, threatening to sue the paper unless both Debbie and her boss Bernice get fired. The paper lets Debbie go to protect itself. So on top of daughters who lie to her, a neighbour screaming at her on the lawn, a stolen photo shoot, a book club trying to push her out, and a husband who just accidentally resigned from his job — Debbie is now also unemployed. Also, Debbie similarly does not share that she is now unemployed with her husband.
So. Debbie’s world is a pressure cooker before the book even really gets going.
Things Start Getting Interesting
Alongside all of this, Debbie has a friend, or something close to one. Harley is beautiful, charming, the kind of woman everyone gravitates toward. But Harley has her own history. She had been seeing a man named Edgar, three decades older, and she convinced him to leave his wife. He had an ironclad prenup so there was no money in it, and Harley dropped him. Edgar then hung himself. He survived but with a severe brain injury and is now in a nursing home. His sister Lizette has now shown up to confront Harley about the whole situation. So Harley is not a good person. We know this early.
At work, Cooper’s coworker Jesse mentions to him in a conversation that Debbie is, quote, “pretty intense.” He tells Cooper about a dinner the four of them had together once, their respective spouses included, where Debbie did not tip the waitress because the waitress had been flirting with Cooper, spilling water everywhere so the server had to clean it up, all out of spite. Cooper seems a little embarrassed by this. We file it away.
Harley also starts showing up around Cooper at the gym. Her boss sees it happening and essentially tells Harley to back off — the man is married.
There is also a situation at the paper involving Garrett, Debbie’s boss who fired her. After Debbie gets fired, Garrett frantically calls the next day — there is pornography on the company website and it’s footage of Garrett having sex with a woman who works at the paper who is not his wife. He claims Debbie did this and even changed the password so even IT could not take it down. Garrett is now threatening her. Debbie does not seem particularly worried.
Then one afternoon Debbie goes to Harley’s house for lunch. She notices a shirt laying around. Big, clearly not Harley’s size. She picks it up. Brings it to her nose. Loses her appetite entirely. She starts piecing it together, and by the time she leaves she is certain. “This changes everything.”
The Opium Night
Now Debbie shifts into gear. She drugs Cooper’s drink with opium, and once he is completely out, she slips out of the house. First stop is Joe’s garden. She plants Japanese beetle traps in every single one of Joe’s prized rose bushes. The ones that stole her magazine shoot. Every. Bush.
Then she heads over to Coach Pike’s house. Remember how she had given him those brownies at the school? The brownies have done their job too, so she uses the easily found hidden spare key to let herself in. She has business to take care of there.
And the next morning, she shows up at the home of a man named Kenneth Bryant. She puts on gloves. She pulls out a gun. We do not get a lot of explanation yet. We just know he is on her list — presumably for turning Cooper down for the promotion.
Coach Pike Gets What’s Coming
At family dinner that night, one of the girls mentions that the police were at school. Cooper is confused — why? And then it comes out: Coach Pike has been arrested. They found a camera in the school bathroom. And there was monitoring apps for it on his phone. He is being charged for having it in the students’ showers, and his career is over. Izzy can go back on the soccer team, because the new coach is nowhere near as strict, or disgusting.
Cooper is sitting there realizing he had absolutely no idea his daughter had even been cut from the team in the first place. Nobody tells him anything. And I do have so many thoughts about why that might be.
Later, Cooper finds a notepad where he had scribbled an address he does not fully recognize. He looks up Coach Pike’s full name, Robert Pike, Googles him, finds his home address, and realizes the street matches the neighbourhood where Debbie was the other night. So his wife was at the arrested coach’s house in the middle of the night. He is starting to wonder what exactly is going on. His logic chain goes something like: there was an app on his phone? Debbie knows apps. It must have been her. Oh there was a camera found there? Debbie installed a doorbell camera at our house. Could Debbie be involved? Weird reasoning.
Lexi and Zane
Lexi, the seventeen-year-old who treats her mother like furniture, comes home one day completely sobbing. Her boyfriend, well, now ex, Zane is threatening to share naked photos of her if she does not have sex with him. She is still a virgin but made the mistake of giving him photos.
Debbie handles this the way Debbie handles everything. She grabs Lexi’s phone, texts Zane pretending to be Lexi saying she reconsidered and wants to meet. She gets there before he does. Leaves a fresh open beer on a bench, laced with opiates. Zane chugs the whole thing, passes out. She deletes the photo of Lexi from his phone, scrolls through and finds a photo of another girl too — because Lexi told her he has done this before. She creates an anonymous email and sends everything to the school administration and the police. Zane is 18, so this would be considered child pornography.
The next morning Zane shows up at the house demanding to talk to Lexi. Debbie answers the door. Very calmly, very clearly, she walks him through exactly what a sex offender registry means for someone’s future. He later crashes his car into the school. Drunk, once he knew where his life was headed.
This is also where we learn something about Debbie’s past. She was raped in her second year of college. She dropped out after. This is important, and it will matter.
Everything Starts Coming Apart
Cooper goes into work one morning and is told money has been going missing from the company accounts, and it has apparently been happening for a while. He thinks they suspect him. He is also very much starting to suspect Debbie of framing him.
Back at home, the girls find a document on Debbie’s computer. It is her advice column, but not the published version. Her draft version. These answers all start normally, like friendly advice, and then every single one ends with instructions for how to kill your spouse. The girls want to know: did you do something to make mom mad? Do you think she’s lost her mind? Then they show Cooper the location history on Debbie’s phone, everywhere she has been for more than ten minutes over the past several weeks. He starts recognizing addresses. Including one he knows belongs to his boss. He rushes to his boss’ house and finds him dead, shot in the head.
From Harley’s side of the story, she is planning a dinner. She is going to invite Debbie over and tell her everything about “Cooper” — how he has been telling Harley for months that he does not love Debbie anymore, does not find her attractive, they have not had sex in years. These are blatant lies, but Harley wants to believe them desperately. She has been seeing this man for a couple of months. He has told her he is falling in love with her. From the actual Cooper’s perspective — he loves Debbie, he thinks she is beautiful and amazing and they kiss every day and sleep in the same bed.
Cooper, meanwhile, gets home and goes straight to the gun safe. The gun is gone. And then it hits him: he asked for a raise and a promotion, got turned down, quit in a fit of anger. And now his boss has turned up dead, shot in the head. Probably with a gun that has his fingerprints on it. And there is money missing from the company accounts. He is being framed for murder and embezzlement.
The Dinner
The day everything happens, Debbie arrives at Harley’s at six o’clock. There is a lot of food. Harley mentions she invited someone else, her boyfriend — a little older, she met him at the gym, they have only been seeing each other a couple of months but he says he is falling in love with her. And there is one small thing: he is married. Debbie asks if he is at least separated. No, Harley says. Still with his wife. Would have left her ages ago, but she is emotionally fragile.
The doorbell rings. Harley opens it, says “hello, Cooper” in a low, seductive voice. And then she sees Debbie standing there. All the colour drains from the man’s face. He asks Debbie what she is doing there. And Debbie looks right at him and says: “Hello, Jesse.”
Because the man at the door is not Cooper. He is Jesse. Cooper’s coworker. The man who told Cooper that Debbie was “pretty intense” at that dinner. Debbie had figured out, when she smelled that shirt at Harley’s house, that it was not Cooper’s smell at all. She went to the gym, talked to someone who knew Jesse’s situation, confirmed it. Jesse has been telling Harley his name is Cooper, using his married friend’s name as cover since Cooper has no online presence.
The Real Twist
Real Cooper, meanwhile, is in the car driving to the one address on Debbie’s list he did not recognize. His phone rings. He does not want to answer, but he picks up. A woman asks if he has been drinking. He says no. She says she has to ask — it is her job. She is his sponsor.
And that is the twist. Cooper is not cheating on his wife. He has been in AA. He has been hiding a drinking problem since before he and Debbie ever met and he never told her. All those nights coming home late, all the suspicious behaviour — AA meetings. Jesse is the one who has been cheating, using Cooper’s name as cover. Cooper has been hiding alcoholism, not an affair.
Debbie knows why Jesse is really on her list, and it is not because he was pretending to be her husband. Jesse is Hutch. The man who raped her in her second year of college. She had not seen him again until that dinner — the one Jesse mentioned, the one where Debbie supposedly got “intense” because the waitress was flirting with Cooper. What actually happened at that dinner is that Debbie sat down across from the man who raped her, and he did not even recognize her, and she started shaking so badly and sweating so hard that she knocked over her glass of water. That was the first time she had seen him since.
She has been planning this ever since.
Debbie drugged Jesse with opium with the help of a woman from the gym. She shoots Harley. Harley was not innocent, but she also did not personally wrong Debbie, even though she thought she was sleeping with Debbie’s husband. She frames Jesse for Harley’s murder. She has also framed Jesse for the murder of Kenneth Bryant. And for the missing money from the accounting firm.
Her plan is to shoot Jesse with his own gun and stage it as a murder-suicide. But then she hears Cooper outside, in the street, yelling her name. She shoots the ceiling instead.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. Cooper finds her there. She says she came to visit a friend, but her friend isn’t answering. They leave together. Before they go, he tells her everything — he has a drinking problem, has had one since before they met, never told her. She tells him she was raped in college. That is why she dropped out. He holds her. And then he asks her, very quietly: did you shoot Ken Bryant with my gun? She answers correctly: she did not shoot his boss with Cooper’s gun. She used Jesse’s gun. She does not mention that part.
The epilogue is where everything finally lands. Cooper starts his own accounting firm and it is doing incredibly well. Jesse goes to trial and gets two life sentences. His cellmate delivers a message about someone named Misty, whose brother is owed a favour. Jesse knows that name. He raped her too, and then he killed her. His cellmates beat him in his cell. We are not told if he survives. But Debbie framed him for murder — which happens to be something he actually did do.
And then, right at the very end: Cindy Bryant. She works at the gym. She was the one who tipped Harley off that her “Cooper” is actually a married man named Jesse. Cindy felt she owed Debbie something significant. Two years ago she wrote into the newspaper about the financial abuse her husband was putting her through. Debbie’s column told her to leave. She did. Her husband was Ken Bryant — the one who threatened to sue and got Debbie fired, and also Cooper’s boss. Debbie had helped Cindy find a place to live and get back on her feet. Cindy helped Debbie expose Jesse, including spiking his water bottle at the gym. The real reason Debbie killed Ken had as much to do with what he did to Cindy as what he did to her.
Cooper and Debbie, apparently, have never been better.
I do have a couple of threads I can’t shake. If Debbie always knew Cooper would not cheat on her, and she figured out early that it was Jesse at Harley’s house, then what did she think Cooper was doing all those nights he had his location turned off? It never quite gets answered. And Jesse in jail — beaten by cellmates, possibly almost to death, possibly dead, we genuinely do not know. I would like to know.
Steam Rating Breakdown
- Sex? Implied
- Open or closed door? Closed door
- Descriptive? No
- How much? Very little — this is a revenge thriller, not a romance
Would I Reread It?
Yes, but with the caveat that knowing the twists going in would completely change the experience, and not necessarily for the better — not knowing that Cooper is actually two different people here is the twist. This one really does benefit from not knowing where it is going.
Who Is This For
If you like a thriller with a woman at the centre who is quietly, methodically destroying everyone who has wronged her while maintaining the appearance of a normal life, this is your book. It is part dark comedy, part revenge story, part domestic suspense, and it moves fast. Fans of Freida McFadden generally will not be disappointed. If you liked The Housemaid or The Teacher, you will be right at home.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible US | Audible CA | Libro.fm
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Thriller | Steam: 🔥🔥 | Narrators: January LaVoy, Julia Whelan & Scott Brick
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