Monday, April 25, 2022

The Maid


The Maid
By Nita Prose
Ballantine Press, 2022. 304 pages. Mystery

Molly has her daily routine. She wakes up, eats her breakfast, dresses in her uniform, and heads to work as a maid at The Regency Grand Hotel. Her life is lonely and stressful since her Gran died and her life savings were lost, and Molly struggles to make friends and interpret social cues. But making beds, vacuuming neat lines in the carpet, and returning each room to a state of perfection brings order and joy to Molly’s life. 

That is, it brings her joy until the day she finds wealthy Mr. Black, a regular hotel guest, dead in his bed. As the person who found the body and because of her confusing reaction to this shocking event, Molly winds up as the police’s primary suspect. Molly must turn at last to the people she works with each day, finding hidden foes and stalwart friends among them. 

This is a compulsively readable novel with real heart. Whether you’re usually a mystery fan or not, Molly quickly will win you over with her good heartedness, and you’ll find yourself rooting for her every step of the way.

If you like The Maid, you might also like:

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Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. That, combined with her unusual appearance (scarred cheek, tendency to wear the same clothes year in, year out), means that Eleanor has become a creature of habit (to say the least) and a bit of a loner. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kind of friends who rescue each other from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond's big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.

By Mark Haddon
Doubleday, 2003. 226 pages. Fiction (general)

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.

SGR

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