The Tenant by Freida McFadden

 

What a ride. This book here, is why I LOVE Freida McFadden. Her books are just FUN. I mean, I don't think it's some literary masterpiece or anything, but it's a guilty pleasure for sure. 

The Tenant starts off quite innocently. The protagonist, Blake Porter, is celebrating his recent promotion when he got called into the boss's office. He's getting fired. His boss tells him he shouldn't have sold their current project to their biggest competitor. Blake claims he didn't, but his boss Wayne is so mad that he doesn't let Blake explain himself. 

Blake comes home to his fiance Christa. Christa seems to be quite understanding. Christa works at a laundromat - they are facing some serious financial issues now Blake doesn't have a job. A few weeks pass, Blake can't get a job anywhere - his boss has told all potential employers what he did. Christa tells him she can help with the mortgage payments on their new giant place, but Blake feels awful about that. Then she offered to sell her giant engagement ring. Blake doesn't really want her to have to do that either. Next, Christa suggested to get a roommate to help with the bills. Reluctantly Blake agrees.

After going through some seriously bad roommate candidates, Blake is very relieved when a rather normal girl, Whitney, shows up for the roommate interview. All her references check out, she's been sleeping on friend's couches, and ready to move in. Blake is happy. Not only does she seem like the perfect roommate, she's also quite sexy. Whitney moves in and pays Blake first month's rent and deposit. 

Things go bad quickly though - Blake offered his cereal and toiletries for Whitney to use before she has to run to the store to get her own. Next day, the cereal, shampoo and bodywash are all empty. He lets her use their washer and dryer, since she lives there with them. But soon after, he starts getting rashes on his body. He knows he's allergic to limonene but he hasn't changed his detergent. He's also having trouble sleeping at night - he keeps hearing pounding noises from upstairs/Whitney's room, but when he goes up there, the noise would stop. He believes Whitney hates him for some unknown reason. The house has a fruit fly infestation, he follows the sources and found some rotten apples in a brown bag in the top shelf of the cabinets. He takes it out and leaves it on Whitney's bed!

Christa repeatedly tells Blake that there's nothing wrong with Whitney - they are friends and getting along great. She doesn't hear the noises at night and she can't believe he would put a rotten bag of apples with fruit flies and maggots in Whitney's bed. She eventually tells him they need to break up. She's going to stay at her friend Becky and her husband Malcolm's house. Blake is destroyed, but he knows how he sounds in the last few months so he doesn't really blame her.

He decides to look into Whitney. He thinks she's evil reincarnate. He finds her mom's address and decides to pay her a visit. Mrs. Cross opens the door and tells him that Whitney is a very bad person. She hasn't come home in a long time and Mrs. Cross thinks her daughter is probably dead. She also tells Blake that Whitney had an ex-boyfriend Jordan who cheated on her and he later died by falling off a roof. She thinks Whitney pushed him. Whitney left the town shortly after to not have to deal with investigation. Blake thinks this sounds just like the Whitney he knows, when he notices a picture. He points at someone in the picture and asks Mrs. Cross who that is. That is Whitney, of course. But, it's not Whitney, the person in the picture is CHRISTA. Blake gets out of there super confused. The picture shows Christa, for sure. 

Next section of the book is told from Christa's point of view and we learn who she really is. Christa's real name is Whitney Cross. She got a new identity from her hacker friend Elijah (who is totally in love with her). She met Blake by chance and was truly in love with him, with the dream of getting married one day, when she found out that Blake slept with his boss's secretary Staci. Instead of confronting him, she decides he must pay. She downloaded all the work he's done for his company and sold it to their biggest competitor for a handsome amount, getting him fired. Around the same time, she ran into a waitress at a local restaurant with the name Whitney Cross. She wonders why someone would use her old name. She asks Elijah to help out of course. Elijah finds out that Whitney's real name is Amanda. Christa wants Whitney to pay for using her name. So she devises the plan of having her move in as a roommate. She hires some actors for other roommate "candidates" by acting like crazy people, so Blake would be ready to take Whitney on as the best choice by far.

Next, Christa sets up the music, the detergent, the rotten apples, dumped out the cereal and shampoo, etc., all to make Blake hate Whitney. As if that's not enough, she also kills the old man next door and plant evidence on Blake as the murderer. She also abducts Staci and kills her, taking some of her fingers and leaving them in Blake's house. By then Christa had moved out but she still has a key.

Now Blake knows Christa is the real Whitney, Blake knows she's not a good person. He finds a suicide note in his pocket, and realized Christa planned on killing him next, making it seem like a suicide, and frame all of the deaths on him. He reads the suicide notes a couple of times, the words "all of the lives I've taken" gives him pause. He immediately thinks of the old man next door, and Staci (he knew about Staci being missing at the time), but the word "all" implies more than 2. He realizes Christa is going to kill Amanda too. He tries to rush back from Whitney's mom's house, but he remembers he just ate a whole bag of Christa's amazing cookies, cookies she had dropped off at the house before he left. He suddenly realizes the cookies are drugged and tried to get himself to puke as much as possible. Then he starts driving.

By the time he is almost home, he starts feeling the effects of the poison. He has to keep going. It's around 7. Whitney usually gets off work at 10. So he thinks he will make it on time. Finally, he gets home and realizes he's too late - Christa and Amanda are both there. Amanda is sitting on the couch covered in blood with a stab wound in the abdomen. Blake is acting like a bumbling idiot due to the poison. He can't rescue anyone - he's falling down on his own. Suddenly, Amanda stabs at Christa and kills her. Blake wants to save her but he can't as he can barely breathe himself. Amanda calls 911 and they are saved. Blake survives from the poison. 

Blake and Amanda aren't charged for anything. Blake and Amanda make up. Blake asks Amanda why she had to change her identity. Amanda tells him it's because she took out loans from a loan shark for her mother's cancer treatments. Her mother died anyway. She's not able to repay and the loan shark wants to kill her. (The same story she had told Christa before.) Blake feels so bad for her and can't believe Christa wanted to kill Amanda when Amanda is so kind. Blake also feels bad that now Amanda's cover is blown, the loan sharks can come back to her. Amanda says she's OK because she's been able to cash in on her fame a little. 

Now we are in the epilogues of the book. With everything coming to light, Blake was able to get his old job back, because his boss learned what happened, and his replacement, Malcolm, was no good at the job anyway. Amanda comes clean to us about her debt - it's not to pay for her mom's cancer. She hates her mom. Her loan comes from a bad gambling habit she had. Apparently, the loan shark as well as Jordan's family never stopped looking for Whitney, so when she used Whitney's name, Jordan's uncle reached out to her and told her if she kills Christa, he would clear her debt. So when she showed up that night to meet Christa, she was there to kill her anyway. (They had scheduled the meeting with the premise of getting an apartment together.)

Oh I totally forgot, before Christa came to meet Amanda, she participated in some pity sex with Elijah and slit his throat after. The most shocking part of the book for me. Like most Freida's books, this did not disappoint.