Why You'll Love This
The office outcast you dismissed turns out to be the most dangerous person in the building.
- Great if you want: a workplace thriller with an unreliable, morally murky cast
- The experience: fast and compulsive — dual POVs ratchet tension with each chapter
- The writing: McFadden flips sympathy mid-book; you'll distrust your own read of characters
- Skip if: you find the twist-heavy thriller formula exhausting
About This Book
Every office has that one person no one quite knows what to do with. In The Coworker, Dawn Schiff is that person — punctual, peculiar, and easy to overlook. When she suddenly vanishes from her desk one morning, her colleague Natalie Farrell gets pulled into something far darker than a missing-person mystery. McFadden builds her story around a disquieting question: what do we actually owe the people we dismiss, and what happens when ignoring someone turns out to be its own kind of danger?
What makes this novel work as a reading experience is its dual-perspective structure, which forces readers to hold two very different women in their heads simultaneously — and to keep revising their assumptions about both. McFadden writes with a stripped-down, propulsive style that keeps pages turning without sacrificing character. The real craft here is in how she handles dramatic irony: you sense the gap between what characters believe and what is actually true long before the reveals arrive, which makes the mounting tension feel genuinely earned rather than manufactured.
