Molly is a maid at a luxury hotel. Because of who she is in many ways, she loves everything about her job and being in that environment. She and her guardian grandmother were quite poor until she got this job. But although she loves cleaning she says she really has no friends. She lived with her beloved grandmother but Grandma died 9-months prior to the story’s opening. Molly appears to have Asperger’s – or is on the spectrum anyway. Her grandmother had explained things to her and Molly is full of things Granny said.
The Maid
by Nita Prose
2022 (280 pages)
Read by Lauren Ambrose 9h 37m
Rating – 8.5 / Literary Crime
On the day the story opens Molly has found a dead man in his bed in his room. According to Molly, this was “a seismic event.”
The very rich and handsome Charles Black and his much younger, trophy wife of two years Giselle, stay in the room about 1 week a month while Charles inspects his large real estate holdings in the city. The narrative backtracks a bit from when Molly finds the body and then it goes forward with less and less backstory as the plot moves forward
The book is a bit long for the story it carries and although I thoroughly enjoyed parts of it, and there were some wonderful twists along the way, there were other places where I actually almost nodded off. Also there were times I felt the character of Molly slipped and showed better perception than I’m accustomed to – could be though – this is all a spectrum now.
It’s been a long time since I read a novel which included a character with Asperger’s so I’m glad to have seen it some time ago and put a hold on it at the library. That’s where it showed up while I’d forgotten about it at Audible. Yay!
The books with Asperger’s characters have often been quite fun in their own way. The Gauguin Connection (a series) by Genevieve Ryan, The Rosie Project and sequel by Graeme Simsion, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, and Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata) are a few of my favorites. This is a nice addition.
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