Molly Gray is an unusual woman. She works as a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel, and she takes great pleasure in making sure each room she cleans is perfection. She shines the mirrors, makes a crisp bed with hospital corners and four pillows (two firm, two soft), vacuums all the footsteps from the carpet, and scrubs the bathroom so everything is sanitary. Cleaning a room to perfection makes her happy.
What doesn’t make her happy? Having to deal with other people. She has trouble reading social cues and often says the wrong thing, upsetting people without meaning to. When her Gran was alive, she helped Molly figure out what other people meant, making social exchanges easier for her. But since she died, Molly has had a lot more trouble understanding what other people are really saying, when their words don’t agree with their expressions.
Molly does have acquaintances at the hotel. The doorman, Mr. Preston, was a friend of her Gran’s and he’s always pleasant to Molly when she goes in to work. She likes the bartender Rodney and hopes that he might ask her out to dinner again soon. They went to The Olive Garden together after she accidentally went in a guest room to clean it, not announcing herself as she had been told that the room was vacant, and instead discovered Rodney, Juan Manuel the dishwasher, and two other large tattooed men that Rodney insisted were friends of Juan Manuel.
And Molly will need her friends more than ever now, because she went into the Blacks’ suite one afternoon to finish her cleaning, and she found Mr. Black dead on their bed. Mr. and Mrs. Black (the second Mrs. Black, Giselle) had been staying at the Regency Grand Hotel off and on for many months. Mr. Black had never been very nice to her, but Giselle would help her out. She would take the time to explain to Molly some of those social cues she’d missed or point out rules of behavior that Molly hadn’t learned yet, like how to keep some distance between herself and others. Giselle pointed out that Molly would get too close to people when she talked to them and taught her to keep the distance of her cleaning cart between herself and other people.
But now Mr. Black was dead, and the suite she had cleaned earlier that day was a mess. There were little empty liquor bottles lying around, and some of Giselle’s pills had spilled from the bottle. And one of the four pillows was missing from the bed. Molly checked to see if Mr. Black was alive, and when she was certain that he wasn’t, she called downstairs to get help. Then she fainted.
When the police show up, the detective wants to speak to Molly about what she had seen. When the detective realizes that Molly wasn’t behaving quite the way she expected her to, she became suspicious of the maid and added her to the list of suspects. Over the next day or two, Molly asks for help from people she thought were friends, but she just finds herself deeper in trouble with the police. When she gets arrested for murder, she faints again. But when she comes to, Molly realizes that those she thought were her friends had been setting her up, and she needs to figure out who her true friends are to help get her out of jail and get her life back.
The Maid is one of the most talked about books of early 2022, and for good reason. Author Nita Prose has spent years in publishing, editing the books of other people, and she has taken all that expertise and crafted a beautiful story that blends a murder mystery with a character study. Told from the perspective of a woman who is not neurotypical, The Maid feels similar to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. But it’s also a cunning murder mystery as well as a look at the differences between the haves and the have-nots, between those who hide from paparazzi and those who are invisible no matter what they do.
There is a reason The Maid is a Good Morning America Book Club pick. It’s simply that good. It’s the story of a young woman trying to understand her life in challenging circumstances. At its heart, and it has a very big heart, is Molly the Maid, facing her limitations and creating a happy life with people she can depend on and a job that gives her purpose. This is a story that is entertaining, with smiles and tears, and it celebrates the neurodivergent as well as the neurotypical. I loved reading this book, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a warm, fascinating, thought-provoking read.
Egalleys for The Maid were provided by Ballentine Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.
