The Maid

The Maid needs to clean up its act. Ostensibly it’s a cozy mystery, but in reality it’s more like a contrived, saccharine story about an autistic woman overcoming adversity to find happiness.

The protagonist is Molly Gray, a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel. Technically it’s never explicitly stated that Molly is autistic, but it’s extremely clear that she is some sort of neurodivergent. She’s meticulous in cleaning but utterly inept at reading social cues. (For instance, she previously went on a date with the bartender at the hotel bar—and is eagerly awaiting his invitation for a second date over a year later.)

One day, when Molly goes in to clean the suite of Mr. Black, the owner of the hotel, she finds him dead in his bed with a head like lead, far too late for medical intervention. (Molly is chock full of whimsical rhymes.) Molly, in her unerring obliviousness, gets herself involved and placed under suspicion. The bright side of getting arrested is that Molly gets a lawyer, who immediately understands everything because she has social understanding beyond an elementary school level, and is able to resolve the entire incident. That’s the story, I don’t think the details I’ve skimmed over are particularly important.

Molly is a good person in a bad situation—she was raised by her grandmother, who passed several months earlier, and has been in financial straits since then. Molly just wants to live a simple life and help others, and we’re meant to feel sorry for her as naïveté and good-hearted nature inadvertently get her deeper and deeper into trouble. Until Molly, poor little Molly, who has the social graces of a goldfish, is suddenly able to find friends, true friends, who support her and help her and get all her problems solved in a nice little bow. Even though things are dark for a moment, the fact that good wins out in the end is meant to make us feel good and inspired.

Except I’m here for a MURDER MYSTERY. I don’t think there’s anything wrong a story about overcoming the struggles of neurodivergence, but that’s not what I’m here for. (And I don’t even think The Maid is good at that—it feels like everything goes wrong and then everything goes right by author fiat, not Molly growing and solving the struggles on her own.) The murder is basically an afterthought, with literally zero clues. I’ve read other cozy mysteries, and while they are basically never tight, fair-play logic puzzles, they still generally focus on the murder and suspects, but in The Maid the murder feels like little more than background noise.

Also, by the end of the book, it turns out Molly has done some pretty horrendous things, so her happily-ever-after isn't even squeaky clean.

There’s an intentional gap between our understanding and Molly’s. In the beginning of the book, whenever Molly acts like an idiot, that makes us think the author is an idiot. However, soon enough we realize Molly is neurodivergent, which recontextualizes everything up until that point and reveals that the author has been intentionally, not idiotic. Yet initial impression do not go away so easily. There are plenty of elements of the book that are unrealistic or outright incorrect (especially where Molly’s lawyer is involved), so whenever something like that happened, I jumped to the explanation that the author is an idiot, because that’s what my mind had been conditioned to think. And then that would get softened to oh, the author isn't an idiot, we already went over that, maybe she just didn’t realize in this instance, or oh, maybe she’s just smoothing that over because this is a fluffy cozy “mystery” and she doesn’t want to get bogged down in details about that, but “she’s an idiot” was still the first place my mind went every time. I actually think the idea of creating a gap between the neurodivergent protagonist and (presumably) neurotypical reader is interesting, but the way Prose went about it unfortunately had that negative, lingering effect.

Honestly, the most interesting part of The Maid to me is the tagline. “You don't see her. But she sees you...” It focuses on the fact that most people ignore or overlook staff, allowing Molly to eavesdrop and spy on people without anyone finding it suspicious. This also never actually happens in the book. So how did this tagline come about? Did Molly play a more active role in the investigation in an earlier draft of the manuscript, and was the tagline just never changed? Was the tagline created by someone who heard the premise “murder mystery with hotel maid protagonist” but didn’t actually read the book? Was it created by a marketing analyst solely because it’s intriguing, with active disregard for the content of the book? Or something else? This is honestly the most interesting puzzle posed by The Maid.