Do we need to go over the rules again?
The Maid is billed and sold as a mystery novel. I suppose that’s because a body is discovered early on and the plot concerns itself with figuring out the who, what, how, and why of the man’s death. But in most other respects it really bears little resemblance to the genre. Our main character is Molly, a young woman reeling from the death of her beloved Gran, who raised her after her mother’s abandonment. Gran understood Molly in a way that no one else seems to, and taught her the lessons and aphorisms she uses to get through her days as a hotel maid.
Molly’s co-workers mostly regard her as an object of amusement or annoyance, unable to understand how she takes such joy in her work cleaning up hotel rooms, or why she takes her boss’s silly corporate management speak so much to heart. For her part, Molly can’t understand their jokes, or any social cues at all. Is she somewhere on the autism spectrum? Nita Prose doesn’t say, perhaps preferring the freedom to keep Molly’s unique personality it’s own thing rather than be accused of misrepresenting an actual diagnosis. If this strikes you as a cowardly approach, you would not be alone.
Molly narrates The Maid, naturally, and also naturally, is the person who finds the dead body in the hotel room that kicks the plot into gear. Mr. Black was a rich man with a pretty, much younger second wife that Molly has struck up an unlikely friendship with. Mr. Black was not a nice man, something Molly knows because she has noticed the bruises on his wife’s arms. After finding the body and contacting the police, Molly finds herself at the center of the investigation, and her social awkwardness and inability to read other people eventually leads to her becoming the chief suspect despite being completely innocent. Unfortunately, it turns out that in her naivete, Molly had trusted the wrong people and unwittingly gotten involved in things she doesn’t understand.
Eventually, Molly does find people she can trust, who help her in her quest to clear her name and find the person or persons responsible. The formation of this support group is occasionally heart-warming (I’m not made of stone) but it’s a poor substitute for a legitimate mystery plot, with a slew of suspects, motives, clues, and red herrings. The Maid is too straightforward, with its malefactors transparently obvious from their first introduction. A late attempt at introducing complications into the solution is no salve for the tedium that precedes it.
Even if you aren’t as much of a stickler for the rules of mystery fiction, your enjoyment of The Maid will depend heavily on how well you take Molly’s unusual demeanor. Her excessive cheeriness and constant reliance on trite pieces of wisdom were grating to me. I also, as I hinted above, found it enervating that Prose kept Molly’s diagnosis vague. Not only that, she seemed to set her book in a world where no one had ever heard of the autism spectrum. The way other characters reacted to Molly was constantly over-the-top and ridiculous. In combination, this made Molly quite hard to warm up to, and made it difficult to take the book as a whole seriously.