This is the sequel to Nita Prose’s  best-selling debut novel, The Maid (2022).  The thing about this series is that the 1st person narrator likely has Asperger’s and her social skills are quite limited. That’s a huge part of the point, an unstated, but overarching theme of the series maybe.   Molly is very bright about words and there’s nothing wrong with her thinking skills,  it’s mainly her people skills which are different (the phrase from the book).  

The Mystery Guest
By Nita Prose
2024 /
Read by Lauren Ambrose 8h 23m
Rating; A / 8 – literary cozy crime 

Molly Gray, a hotel maid in “The Maid,” has been given a promotion to Head Maid at the Regency Grand Hotel where a VIP mystery guest turns out to be J.D,  Grimthorp a famous author who, after sipping two sips of tea, drops dead only a sentence into his prepared remarks.  

 Molly prepared and her young assistant delivered Mr Grimthorp’s cup of tea to him on a tea tray handy for extras. Then Grimthorp adds 2 heaping spoonfuls of honey to the cup and within minutes is on the floor, a dead man.  As the investigation is underway Molly interacts with a few people from the prior novel but for the most part this is a new cast.  

There are several characters From the prior book continuing on  there’s Cheryl a coworker, Molly’s boss, and Detective Stark.  Juan Manuel is only a walk-on because he’s been emporarily away. And there’s Gran, of course, although she died several years ago, sh’s in Molly’s thoughts and memory – almost as a ghost.  

“His back is as straight as an exclamation point.”  Molly thinks this and it’s a wonderful metaphor because it’s original but also it suits the light-heartedness of the  book and more especially it suits Molly, a very bright but autistic 1st person narrator about 8 years old or so – (mid-grade school).  But the book has many more literary attributes, the themes of being different, there are literary allusions scattered around and the novel’s language, heavily cliche’d,  is fully appropriate to the characters.