At the end of the day, “I have one brain,” she noted, “and there are times when things do bleed over a little bit.”

That said, beyond the thrills, her novels tend to run the gamut plot-wise—whether it’s ex-con Millie and her venture into the Winchester home in The Housemaid or The Inmate’s nurse practitioner Brooke running into her ex at the maximum-security prison she works at. And that’s by design.

“I want to keep it fun for myself,” she said, of her transition from practicing medicine to writer. “I left my job to do this, and I don’t want it to be a drag. I want it to always be fun. So, I’m trying to always do things that are a little different, step out of my comfort zone. and write things that require maybe a little more research. Each time, I just try to stretch a little further.”

Luckily, her mom, often the reader of McFadden’s first drafts, and husband are always up to help bounce around ideas.

“I often will toss things out with my husband,” she told E!. “He’s my secret weapon. If I have a seed of an idea and I’m struggling with it, I’ll talk to him about it, and he’ll kind of spit ball things—he’ll make fun of me, usually, because he can’t help himself—but I think just the act of talking it out to somebody helps so much.”