What an absolutely fabulous book The Maid by Nita Prose is! It is riveting from beginning to end, keeping you turning the pages anxiously and staying up too late to find out what happens!
Molly is, oddly, a character who is simultaneously a revelation and extremely relatable, a testament to the skill of the author in writing the obsessive, socially challenged main character. One cannot help but feel sympathy for the maid as her life spirals out of her control, due largely to her lack of ability to decipher social cues. She is a sympathetic character throughout, and watching her realize the things she has misinterpreted is as spellbinding as the underlying wh0-dunnit of the book.
Thank you to #NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to read this ARC!

I love it when I’m pleasantly surprised by a book. When I first started reading The Maid, I was expecting a standard murder mystery with a strong yet underestimated female lead. But this book was so much more than that: it handles topics that range from classism and exploitation to grief and redemption. It’s the kind of book that lingers with you long after you’ve finished. It may start off a little slow but once the narrative picks up you’ll have trouble putting it down, like I did when I kept reading long past the time when I should have been sleeping.

Molly is not your standard heroine either, which is refreshing in a genre that seems rife with Mary Sue characters. I will take complicated and misunderstood over Mary Sues any day of the week.

Molly Gray is a quirky character. I'm not sure if she is autistic or just raised in an old world environment without social input from school. Her old-fashioned rules that she lives by are ones I was raised by so I understand the conflict of doing what is right in her mind vs. doing what the world does which is good enough.

Molly is a hotel maid. Her dedication to her job makes her a superior employee who can be taken advantage of. When Molly cleans a hotel suite for the 2nd time in one day, out of kindness, she finds the man dead in his bed. What has been going on in this upper class hotel? Has Molly cleaned away evidence?

I read this book in one day. It was intriguing to follow where the author was going with this "sad" character.

"It's easier than you'd ever think—existing in plain sight while remaining largely invisible. That's what I've learned from being a maid. You can be so important, so crucial to the fabric of things and yet be entirely overlooked.”

Genre: Mystery and Thrillers
Actual Rating: 4.5 stars
Content Warnings: Discusses death, murder, and drugs.

“The Maid” follows Molly Gray, a young woman whose passion is to be an exceptional hotel maid. After she finds one of the hotel’s guests dead in his room, she is thrown into a whirlwind of chaos that ends with her being accused of being the murderer. The summary of the book describes it as a “Clue-like, locked-room mystery” and it really delivers just that.

This book has a very interesting narrative. Molly seems to be neurodivergent in some way and I just loved how her inner voice remained consistent. Oh, she is blunt, but she’ll stay blunt throughout the entire novel, through the chaos and sometimes even comical mystery. It made me furious how some people took advantage of her naïvety, but that just made it into an even more wonderful book.

I would recommend this book to fans of murder mystery parties, escape rooms, and true crime shows and podcasts. This book will have you nervous with anticipation and is exceptionally written. The only reason why I didn’t give this book a full 5-star rating is that I wasn’t as surprised as I thought I would be by the end of the book.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a quickly moving murder mystery with a quirky female main character.. It was entertaining to read and kept me guessing right until the end! I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to others.

When I started this book, I had no idea what to expect. Our main character is Molly, who works as a maid at a major hotel. Get it? Molly Maid?

Molly is neurodivergent, a person whose brain processes things differently than most. This fact leaves her very naive and vulnerable to the actions of others. Her thought process is very literal and her interactions with other people can be stilted. Yet she can surprisingly be very intuitive. Her life changes when she comes across a dead body in one of the suites she cleans on a regular basis.

This is classified as a “cozy mystery”, a term I was not familiar with. It simply means there is no violence, murder or sex on the pages. It may still happen but it is “off-page”. Probably I have read such books over the years but the term was not known to me.

I loved how Molly and her circle of “friends” became involved in solving the murder. Honestly, it took me back to my days of reading Nancy Drew books.

This was a sweet story. I particularly liked Molly. She has a heart of gold and wants to think the best of people. But as the story goes on it is interesting to watch Molly become more aware of social nuances, more self-confident, more comfortable with herself.

I am always pleased to run across old-fashioned, rarely used words in a modern novel. I ran across two of them in this book: Besmirched and Guffaw. Actually, this is the second time this year I found Besmirched. Maybe the word is making a comeback!

My favourite quote in the book: We are all the same in different ways.

Enjoyable, entertaining and fun read.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an Advance Readers Copy.

A fun, charming tale told through an odd but witty maid. The writing was eloquent and beautiful. A murder mystery much like the Colombo Gran used to watch. Highly entertaining!

Thank you NetGalley for this arc

Thank you NetGalley, Penguin Random House Canada and the author Nita Prose. This book was fast paced, fun and witty right from page one. I am not going to recap the synopsis..go and read that and come back here to know that the book was just a good hit. If you like cozy mysteries, if you like clue and if you just like trying to solve what is going on, you should read this book. Now you will be guessing but you will never figure it out. It was a good read and what can I say other than.. read it!

Talk about an absorbing book! It is smarter and fresher than the average cozy mystery, chock full of intriguing and varied characters (some likeable, others less so), superb plots, twisty surprises and oodles of clever storytelling. The Maid is almost its own unique genre. As a frequent mystery reader, this felt unexpected to me. A good unexpected.

Quirky (understatement!) Molly Gray is a fastidious maid of twenty five working at the Regency Grand Hotel, a smart boutique hotel where she proudly returns rooms to a state of perfection. In ways she is socially inept and is obsessed with cleaning. She actually pays attention at work meetings. Her rigidity makes her unpopular with others but she loves what she does and excels at it. She lives alone since her beloved Gran died several months earlier and she misses her terribly. Molly often recalls Gran's expressions and mantras and tries to live by them in her own way.

VIP Mr. Black is discovered dead in his suite and chaos ensues. The hotel wishes to prevent publicity but the media publicizes the arrest. And loner Molly finds herself at the heart of the investigation. She discovers she has friends after all. That plot twist, though! Brilliant.

You needn't be a mystery fan to enjoy this book. The important thing is to read it. I lost all track of time for a few hours and did not care one bit.

My sincere thank you to Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for the privilege of reading this wondrous book! Pure enjoyment.

When I first heard about this book it sounded like something I would like and I was absolutely correct. I loved it! I can always find comfort in a cozy mystery and this one sounded like something unique and interesting. The main character Molly is a neuro-divergent maid at a large, fancy hotel. She loves putting everything in order and back to a “state of perfection” when she cleans but has difficulty in social situations. Raised by her grandma, she has old-fashioned ideas and rather antiquated, but very polite, manners. She doesn’t make friends easily as her co-workers dismiss her as weird and strangely robotic. Seeing the world through her eyes was fascinating and even somewhat relatable. After all, who hasn’t been burned by a “bad egg” boyfriend?

She notices and remembers every detail but often misses the larger picture and social cues go right over her head. She is very clever but her naiveté leads her to some bad decisions and she puts herself in situations where most of us would know to run. She tends to think the best of people and their motives which along with her inexperience means that sometimes bad people or “bad eggs” as she calls them find it easy to take advantage of her guilelessness. In this hotel she is a sweet, honest sheep in a pack of wolves. How will this simple, lowly maid (as she calls herself) survive among the horrid, selfish criminals? You will have to read to find out, but she does have a few surprises up her freshly pressed uniform sleeve!

I flew through the pages of this book and truly looked forward to getting back into it every night. I really enjoyed the characters, especially Molly. I found her very easy to like. I cringed at every bad decision and I cheered at every success. The ending was the perfect conclusion to her story but I wouldn’t mind seeing her in another book solving another crime. She is definitely interesting enough to star in her own series.

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada and Viking for providing an Electronic Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley for review.

Molly Gray is a maid at the Regency Grand hotel who does her job well – cleaning is her pride and joy. But Molly has trouble with social cues and relationships. After the death of her Gran, Molly doesn’t have anyone else, so she dives into her work. When she discovers a dead body in one of the hotel rooms she is assigned to clean, Molly gets wrapped up in the crime.

Y’all, I read this book in one day – not one sitting, but one day because my mind couldn’t stop thinking about it: I just had to keep reading. I love mystery novels and the character, plot, and the neurodivergent representation was just *chef’s kiss*. This book enchanted me from the very beginning and I had to keep reading to find out what happened – and I wasn’t disappointed in the plot. I loved the first person perspective as it let me really dive into Molly’s thoughts and actions. I loved this book and would absolutely read another by this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

3/5 stars!

The plot initially felt as though it was dragging along and not really getting to the point. I strongly considered DNF-ing it around the 25-30% mark because it really wasn’t holding my interest. I read a few reviews that raved about the main character and the story in general, so I decided to buckle down and give it a second chance. I did find the story began to hold my interest at the 55-60% mark and I became really intrigued as to how Molly would resolve her multiple predicaments.

I never particularly liked Molly, not in the way other readers seem to have. She’s a little bit off compared to the ‘norm’, which for clarification’s sake, I had no problem with. Who doesn’t love a main character who is a bit eclectic? The main issue I had was the fact that the author felt the need to emphasize this for the first 30% of the novel and continually bring it up for the rest of the story felt like overkill. Like we get it, Molly is perceptively different than others. We don’t need to see her bullied because she has difficulty interpreting body language or nuances in language.

Ultimately, the ending was well done and answered many questions as to what really happened surrounding Mr Black’s death.

<i>I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher of this advanced digital copy for the opportunity to read this novel in exchange for an honest review! All opinions expressed are my own. Upon publishing of this novel, I will also be posting my review to Amazon Canada.</I>

I did not read this book. I will not waste my time trying to read an entire book in PDF format. It is not suitable for this purpose. The reader is forever resizing the text just to get it to fit on the page of the device. Not my idea of "enjoying a good read". Epub or Kindle format is mandatory in my view.

I absolutely loved this book and could not put it down.

The Maid is expertly plotted with quirky characters, nasty ones we love to hate and ones that are just so kind

Molly is the maid who is still mourning the passing of her beloved Gran. Gran always helped interpret what people were saying to Molly as for Molly everything is black and white.

Molly discovers Mr. Black dead and the locked door mystery begins with Molly smack in the middle of it.

I loved Molly with all her quirkiness , her beliefs in everyone and how she sees the world.

Everyone needs a Molly in their life .

Can't wait to see the movie.

You will want to put this book on your TBR and at that top immediately.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada, Viking for a stellar read.

Ah! I loved it! Couldn't put it down. So different from all other books i have recently read - wonderful, diverse characters, just like in real life. Captivating phrasing, so well - written. I predict this will be a bestseller!
thanks for the opportunity to read before it is out on the bookshelf!

I love this book! Molly is so endearing and original and the reader can't help but root for the underdog. Molly is the kind of person that you'd walk right past and not notice, but she notices everything. I love that Molly's strengths are what others assume are her weaknesses. A cozy mystery, yes, but so much more than that. A page-turner, a social commentary, and a darned good read. Brava!

I was absolutely sold on the premise of this book and very excited to get my hands on an ARC for review, but that's where my excitement began and ended. (I will say that I'm not an avid reader of "cozy" mysteries, and this may be excellent for the genre, I can't judge by that barometer, so please take everything I'm saying here with a grain of salt. I need to learn more about what makes a cozy mystery really shine.) I've been stewing about *why* this book was a struggle for me for a few days -- a book about a neurodivergent character finding a body and trying to navigate a murder accusation and processing details of the crime in their own unique way is a fundamentally great premise -- and I think it comes down to the way that neurodivergence is portrayed here. (I should note that the text never specifies that the character IS neurodivergent, she displays many of the hallmarks as well as many of the grossly inaccurate stereotypes associated with autism, which is maybe where it really derails the most for me.) Molly (and all the characters who interact with her) doesn't even seem to be aware that she is neurodivergent which I find hard to believe given the fact this book is set in the present and she goes to college and has a family. Surely, at a minimum, the police detective, after one conversation, would realize that she's not neurotypical and adjust her questioning (and interpretation of Molly's reactions and responses) accordingly. This book has had a lot of comparisons to Elinor Oliphant, but the books couldn't be more dissimilar, in my opinion, in terms of character development and depth. Molly teeters on being a caricature (as do most of the other characters) and the way other people universally treat her, infantalize her, and dehumanize her is uncomfortable to read. I'm genuinely surprised at the number of five star ratings for this book (although I went into the experience thinking it would almost definitely be one for me, too). An uncomfortable read.

I loved this fresh take on a whodunit mystery and loved the inclusion of a neurodivergent narrator, Molly Gray.

Her name may be common and her uniform may allow her to become invisible, but Molly Gray stands out heads above any character I’ve read this year. Molly’s success to date is a result of her grandmother codifying and interpreting for her. The memorized ‘code for living’ lines her grandmother equips Molly with will bring a smile to readers as they will recall hearing most of them in their childhood, too! Molly struggles socially with interpreting social skills and often misunderstands communication resulting in being taken advantage of at work. What she lacks in social skills, she more than makes up for in her work ethic.

To her boss and her clients, twenty-five year old Molly is a treasured maid at a five-star boutique hotel, The Regency Grand Hotel, and thrives in a solitary and predictable work environment. When she discovers one of the guests dead as she arrives to clean his room, her world is upended. This is one mess that Molly can’t easily clean up. What ensues is more stressful for the reader than for Molly. Unaware that she’s the target, her actions often harm her situation more than help it. Thankfully, she discovers that she does have a few real friends who are looking out for her. Can everyone pull together to help clear Molly and shed light on the real killer?

What a spectacular offering for a debut author! Author Nita Prose sheds light on the importance of being seen, the importance of realizing we had the power all along, and the sometimes ‘grayish’ hue accompanying the truth. You’ll want to add this Agatha Christie-like murder mystery with an unlikely detective to your TBR as it’s to appear on the silver screen and will star Florence Pugh.

Publishes January 4, 2022

I was gifted this advance copy by Nita Prose, Penguin Random House Canada, and NetGalley and was under no obligation to provide a review.

What a fantastic book! Molly is a wonderfully developed character; full of charisma and so very loveable. The story itself was well written with lots of subtle twists and turns within the plot. It is easy to imagine this book as a film in the near future! I enjoyed reading this very much and looking forward to reading more books by Nita Prose.

This ARC was kindly provided by NetGalley and Simon and Schuster publishers in exchange for an honest review.

Need a tissue for your issue? Molly, the maid, has your back. If you loved Eleanor Oliphant, it’s fair to say that you’d love The Maid by Nita Prose.

Molly Gray loves her job as a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel. She thrives by turning each room she cleans back into a state of perfection. She also appreciates that her training has taught her exactly what to say in any given situation. Molly is a bit socially awkward and has a difficult time reading people. She can’t always tell if people are laughing with her or at her. And she doesn’t always say the right thing, even if she meant to compliment rather than offend.

Molly’s gran recently passed, so she’s been working harder than ever to get the bills paid. It is on one of her shifts that her life will change forever.

She begins cleaning one of her regular rooms when she realizes the body lying on the bed is not sleeping but is undoubtedly dead. The body belongs to one Mr. Charles Black, a wealthy and frequent guest of the hotel. Due to Molly not displaying “normal” reactions to Mr. Black’s death, she soon becomes the lead suspect in the investigation. This charming and heartwarming story unfolds from there as Molly tries to understand and navigate these new circumstances.

This book is not even out yet, and there is so much hype surrounding it. In this case, the hype is totally warranted. Once I picked it up, I could not put it back down. And I believe it is being adapted into a film starring Florence Pugh. I cannot wait.

There are themes of not conforming to society’s standards, feeling invisible, and lasting friendships.

The Maid is a cozy mystery, but I’d still read it just to be in Molly’s head. The mystery itself is well-plotted, and while I didn’t correctly guess who did it, I wasn’t trying to - I simply enjoyed the ride.

It is a very touching book and will be sure to steal your heart.

Thank you to Viking / Penguin Random House Canada for the arc provided via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.