Sequel to 'The Maid' lives up to the hype
MOLLY Gray, the heroine of The Mystery Guest, has inherited a trove of maxims from her late grandmother, but the one she repeats most often is this gem about making hasty assumptions: “When you assume, you make an A-S-S out of U and ME“.
I thought of that wisdom after I read The Mystery Guest, and then went back and read its predecessor, The Maid, a novel by Nita Prose in which Molly made her debut.
As someone whose tastes in mysteries skew towards the hardboiled, I initially passed on The Maid because I assumed that a story featuring a hotel maid as an amateur detective was going to be stuffed with heart-warming fluff.
The author's fans already know, Molly is a sensitive young woman who processes the world differently. She's hyper-attentive to details like, say, a tiny smudge on a TV remote.
This single-minded focus makes Molly an excellent maid, but she's not so sharp when it comes to reading people or catching the undertones of conversations.
The Mystery Guest, however, finds Molly in a better position, professionally and personally, than she was a few years earlier.
She's been promoted to head maid and she's happily living with Juan Manuel, the sweet kitchen worker who had fallen into the grip of a predatory co-worker in the earlier novel. Juan is visiting his family in Mexico, so he's not on hand to help in this outing, which finds Molly confronting a real mess: the death of a famous mystery writer, JD Grimthorpe, who keeled over while signing books at a reception at the Regency Grand.
Foul play is involved. To make matters even more muddled, Molly spent a fair amount of time with Grimthorpe when she was a child, because Gran worked as a housemaid for him and his wife.
Although young Molly and Grimthorpe became unlikely friends, he fails to recognise her at that fatal reception at the Regency Grand, even when she steps in front of him to have her copy of his latest book signed. Because of their proximity to the victim and the murder weapon, Molly and her protégé – a nervous young woman named Lily Finch – become the prime suspects of the police investigation.
Molly is also troubled by the strange behaviour of her good friend Mr Preston, the doorman at the Regency. As she digs deeper into the past to ferret out the truth about Grimthorpe and his murder, Molly also despairs of her own limitations.
Throughout this novel, Prose vividly depicts working people stuck in tight places with no easy exits.
The Mystery Guest isn't as intricately plotted as its superb predecessor, The Maid, but Prose scatters enough revelations throughout this tale to keep tension at a moderate setting.
Besides, the characters of Molly and her beloved Gran, women who are overlooked because of the kind of work they do, are the overwhelming draw of the Maid novels. In this affecting and socially pointed mystery series, invisibility becomes the superpower of the pink-collared proletariat.