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The Maid: The instant Sunday Times and the No.1 New York Times bestseller, a gripping read in mystery books that everyone’s talking about Paperback – 2 February 2022
Nita Prose (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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*The instant Sunday Times Top 5 bestseller*
*The New York Times No.1 bestseller*
*One of Buzzfeed’s highly anticpated Booktok reads in 2022*
‘Delightful’ GUARDIAN
‘An escapist pleasure’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘A true 21st century heroine’ JANICE HALLETT
‘Smart, riveting, and deliciously refreshing ’ LISA JEWELL
‘An instantly gripping and delightful whodunnit’ STYLIST
_________________________________________________________________
I am your maid.
I know about your secrets. Your dirty laundry.
But what do you know about me?
Molly the maid is all alone in the world. A nobody. She’s used to being invisible in her job at the Regency Grand Hotel, plumping pillows and wiping away the grime, dust and secrets of the guests passing through. She’s just a maid – why should anyone take notice?
But Molly is thrown into the spotlight when she discovers an infamous guest, Mr Black, very dead in his bed. This isn’t a mess that can be easily cleaned up. And as Molly becomes embroiled in the hunt for the truth, following the clues whispering in the hallways of the Regency Grand, she discovers a power she never knew was there. She’s just a maid – but what can she see that others overlook?
Escapist, charming and introducing a truly original heroine, The Maid is a story about how the truth isn’t always black and white – it’s found in the dirtier, grey areas in between . . .
*RIGHTS SOLD IN 29 TERRITORIES*
‘Gripping, deftly written, and led by a truly unforgettable protagonist in Molly. I'm recommending it to everyone I know' EMMA STONEX
‘Beautiful writing, an intriguing mystery, and a colourful cast of friends and sleuths ensure The Maid sparkles with wit and tension’ LUCY CLARKE
‘Fresh, fiendish and darkly beguiling. The Maid is so thrillingly original, and clever, and joyous. I just adored every page’ CHRIS WHITAKER
A Sunday Times No.4 bestseller for w/c 24/01/2022
A New York Times No.1 bestseller for w/c 31/01/2022
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins GB
- Publication date2 February 2022
- Dimensions15.3 x 2.6 x 23.4 cm
- ISBN-100008435731
- ISBN-13978-0008435738
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Product description
Review
‘A smart, riveting, and deliciously refreshing debut. Prose knows how to pen a murder mystery with tremendous heart’ Lisa Jewell
‘The book’s endearing central character and atmospheric hotel setting make it an escapist pleasure ― a mini-break between the pages’ Sunday Times
‘Finally booksellers have a concrete answer to the question 'I loved Eleanor Oliphant – what should I read next?'’ Bookbrunch
‘A gripping and heart-warming whodunnit narrated by an intriguing and original heroine. Skilfully layered and masterfully told. I loved it’ Santa Montefiore
‘An endearing debut . . . Prose threads a steady needle with the intricate plotting’ New York Times
‘The Maid is elegant, warm-hearted and wry, and Molly the most winningly off-beat narrator since Eleanor Oliphant. An absolute joy’ Louise Candlish
‘An instantly gripping and delightful whodunnit’ Stylist
‘I enjoyed every minute of this twisty yet tender thriller. The Maid is gripping, deftly written, and led by a truly unforgettable protagonist in Molly. I'm recommending it to everyone I know' Emma Stonex
‘Nita Prose has created a true 21st Century heroine in a brilliantly-written, transformative story’ Janice Hallett
‘Molly the Maid has captured my heart! I loved this charming and utterly original whodunit . . . Put this on your to-read pile immediately’ Sarah Pearse
‘Startingly good . . . a thoroughly beguiling read . . . full of such offbeat charm that you will root for [Molly] all the way’ Reader’s Digest
‘Unlike anything else I’ve read, this kept me up way past lights out’ Katie Fforde
‘This is going to be HUGE! A heroine as loveable and quirky as Eleanor Oliphant, caught up in a crime worthy of Agatha Christie. Loved it!’ Clare Pooley
‘A contemporary murder mystery with a unique heroine who will appeal to Eleanor Oliphant fans’ Daily Mail
Book Description
The instant Sunday Times and the No.1 New York Times bestseller, a gripping read in mystery books that everyone’s talking about
About the Author
Nita Prose is a long-time editor, serving many bestselling authors and their books. She lives in Toronto, Canada, in a house that is only moderately clean.
www.nitaprose.com
@NitaProse
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Product details
- Publisher : HarperCollins GB (2 February 2022)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0008435731
- ISBN-13 : 978-0008435738
- Dimensions : 15.3 x 2.6 x 23.4 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 14 in Lawyers & Criminals Humour
- 18 in Dark Humour
- 28 in U.S. Literature
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Nita Prose is a longtime editor, serving many bestselling authors and their books. She lives in Toronto, Canada, in a house that is only moderately clean. Visit her at nitaprose.com or on Twitter: @NitaProse.
Customer reviews

Reviewed in Australia on 17 March 2022
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Top reviews from Australia
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Molly Gray, fastidious maid at the Regency Grand Hotel finds the body of a guest, Mr Black, stone cold dead in his swish suite. Molly’s trusting nature and naivety soon lands her in hot water when she becomes the main suspect in Mr Black’s murder.
When she’s arrested and charged, it seems all is lost. Molly, the oddball maid who takes life a little too literally, seems to be hiding something. Is she telling the truth? Or is she protecting someone? Or, is she just being targeted because she’s odd and convenient?
I wasn’t expecting the cosy mystery/feel good vibes given the blurb, but I really did enjoy this. Molly leads a cast of quirky, likeable characters.
Nita Prose did an excellent job of making the characters come to life and drawing us along in a page-turning mystery. I will admit I was a little disappointed when everything was wrapped up about 80% through the book - I really was expecting some bulging biceps, no-neck thug to step in an kidnap or attempt to kill Molly, but that didn’t happen.
There is a final unexpected twist at the end - I won’t spoil this because I do want you to go out and read this book. The feel of the book is part domestic thriller, part-cosy mystery and has strong Eleanor Oliphant vibes. I definitely recommend it if you want something a little different but with a few well-honed mystery/thriller tropes.

Reviewed in Australia on 17 March 2022
Molly Gray, fastidious maid at the Regency Grand Hotel finds the body of a guest, Mr Black, stone cold dead in his swish suite. Molly’s trusting nature and naivety soon lands her in hot water when she becomes the main suspect in Mr Black’s murder.
When she’s arrested and charged, it seems all is lost. Molly, the oddball maid who takes life a little too literally, seems to be hiding something. Is she telling the truth? Or is she protecting someone? Or, is she just being targeted because she’s odd and convenient?
I wasn’t expecting the cosy mystery/feel good vibes given the blurb, but I really did enjoy this. Molly leads a cast of quirky, likeable characters.
Nita Prose did an excellent job of making the characters come to life and drawing us along in a page-turning mystery. I will admit I was a little disappointed when everything was wrapped up about 80% through the book - I really was expecting some bulging biceps, no-neck thug to step in an kidnap or attempt to kill Molly, but that didn’t happen.
There is a final unexpected twist at the end - I won’t spoil this because I do want you to go out and read this book. The feel of the book is part domestic thriller, part-cosy mystery and has strong Eleanor Oliphant vibes. I definitely recommend it if you want something a little different but with a few well-honed mystery/thriller tropes.

Overall though, I enjoyed the pace of book and thought it was very well-written.
What a character is Molly and so glad that she was true to herself and honest.
Top reviews from other countries

There has been quite a lot of noise around this debut novel from editor-turned-author, Nita Prose, with the film rights having been snapped up quickly by Universal Studios. I also found the synopsis appealing and liked the idea of a locked-room style mystery with a quirky and engaging central character at the heart of the story.
Sure enough, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the early stages of the novel. Molly is a wonderfully endearing character. She has had a sheltered upbringing with her beloved grandmother, who died a few months ago. She is socially awkward and would probably have to be described as being "on the spectrum". The values that have been instilled in Molly have led to her becoming quite idiosyncratic with moral values and a mode of speech that would generally be considered to be old-fashioned. The combination of her upbringing and innate character also means that she is often extremely naïve and open to manipulation by others.
At this point the novel was shaping up to be just what I hoped it might be. I felt invested in Molly, but was prepared for her to experience some heartrending exploitation as the remainder of the story unfolded.
Unfortunately, the latter sections of "The Maid" were not as satisfying as the first half of the book had given them the potential to be. From around the midway mark the overall quality showed some marked deterioration. The criminal plot is simplistic and the characterisation, aside from Molly, is disappointingly basic and two-dimensional. Even Molly's character is less convincingly handled in some of the later stages, with the actions that she takes seeming wholly inconsistent with her intrinsic values and behavioural patterns from earlier in the piece. It all becomes a bit too sickly sweet and little more than a run-of-the-mill cosy drama.


Why 1*? Simple: in the court room denouement where XYX are being tried instead of our gormless protagonist ("Here's a tissue for your issue....") her feisty lady lawyer is questioning her on the stand! That's the job of the ADA or Defence Attorney in this nameless city; it's a criminal trial not a civil trial. A prosecution witness doesn't have her own defence counsel.....
One is told that the author is herself a well-known publisher & editor. Well, it'll end up on Netflix / Amazon and hopefully they'll get their facts checked and lose the page after page of dross. I only finished it in order to confirm to myself just how truly awful it was.....and it was.

As the maid who got her revenge in the end . I would recommend this to any book club as a very easy read.

The story is told by the likeable Molly Gray, aged 25, the maid in the beautiful Regency Grand Hotel. She had been brought up by and lived with her much-loved grandmother, who had died nine months earlier. The grandmother had been a fountain of clichéd advice, which Molly constantly recalls. Memories of her grandmother are prominent throughout the book – including of the physical pain she suffered before her death, and that Molly had obeyed her wish that she should do an act of mercy-killing with a pillow at the end. This traumatic event will account for Molly’s reactions to later events.
Molly loved and took pride in every detail of her work, in being an “invisible” part of the splendid hotel. She is innocent and naïve, thinks the best of people, and describes herself as socially gauche, unperceptive, making inappropriate remarks, over-explaining in answers to questions. She has an obsessive cleaning disorder. We have here an excellent portrayal of an autistic person.
Everything changes for her one day when she went to the suite of rooms (401) occupied by one of the hotel’s regular guests, the well-known and wealthy property mogul, Mr Charles Black, and Giselle, his second wife.. She finds him dead in his bed, amid a cascade of pills from the bottle of Giselle, his second wife.
That morning she saw a newspaper article about a row in the Black family between Mr Black and his first wife and daughter who had shares in his company which Mr Black wanted back.
Stark, a woman detective has been called and wants Molly to accompany her to the police station to take a statement of what she had seen. There again Molly over-explained everything she had noticed during her duties that day, but suppressed some things that she feels might incriminate Giselle, who had always been friendly towards her and had even told her that she suffered from her husband’s tyranny.
The following morning everyone at the hotel was sympathetic to Molly for the shock of her discovery, especially Rodney Stiles, the barman, who asked her for an evening meeting. Molly had always taken a fancy to him and was thrilled about this “date”. She had seen him that morning in a room she had been told was empty and which she was about to clean. Rodney was with Juan Manuel, a Mexican dishwasher in the kitchen, and with two foul-mouthed “behemoths” with shaven heads and facial tattoos. The four were disturbed to see her, and the reader immediately sees that something sinister is going on, and that Rodney was making a veiled threat to Juan Manuel; but Molly did not pick this up, even when Rodney asked her not to tell anyone that she had seen them. Rodney spun her a story which she guilelessly accepts: that he was looking after Juan Manuel, whose landlord had turned him out because he had discovered that he was an illegal immigrant, and so he had put him up in a room which he knew was empty; and Molly would do them a favour if she always told them each day which room in the hotel was empty at the time.
Mr Preston, the hotel doorman, saw Rodney depart and warned Molly to be careful of him: he is a bad man.
The post-mortem had shown that Black had been suffocated. There were only three pillows instead of four on the bed.
The next day, Molly is put under arrest for first degree murder, and for having helped Mr Black to run a drug operation through the hotel. Stark tells her that they have interviewed many of the people at the hotel about her – and that Rodney had thought her “more than capable of murder”, at which point Molly realized how she had been betrayed by him. She was allowed to contact a lawyer and she phoned Mr Preston for help. He turned up at the police station accompanied by his daughter, Charlotte, who just happened to be a lawyer. Having heard her father’s high opinion of Molly, she posted bail for her release.
It is at this point that, sadly, the book begins to disappoint. There is a sequence of events which I found difficult to follow, and which required Molly to act a part which I would not have thought she was capable of playing, but which resulted in Rodney being arrested and charged with the murder, and the charges against Molly being withdrawn.
At Rodney’s trial, Molly makes a revelation for the first time which, I would have thought, would get her into trouble for having concealed it for so long. There was enough evidence against Rodney to have him sent to prison. For one thing, he had worked with Black on the drugs operation and had forced Juan Manuel, in the empty rooms, to cut the drugs – but at the end of the book we find that, even at the trial, she did not mention what she had really experienced and which would have shown who the real murderer was.
But we are to believe that her behaviour at the trial had earned her a respect she was not used to. She was promoted to head maid. Juan Manuel had also done very well at the trial. Charlotte had secured a work permit for him; he moved in with Molly and they lived happily for ever afterwards.