From the Stacks: Mystery novel stars neurodivergent maid

"The Maid" by Nita Prose.
"The Maid" by Nita Prose.

In "The Maid," by Nita Prose, quirky 25-year-old Molly Gray loves her job as a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel. She begins each workday laser focused on returning each room to pristine condition, which she does with precision and pride as the hardest working employee of the hotel. She doesn't care that her co-workers call her names like Roomba because of her frequent misreading of social cues and her reliance on old-fashioned rules of etiquette.

Without her loving, kind grandmother who died a few months ago, it's been difficult for neurodivergent Molly to navigate the world. Besides a shared love for cleaning their apartment and watching reruns of Columbo, Molly relied on Gran to interpret people's true intentions and to navigate complex social interactions she found difficult to understand. Brought up on Gran's cliches about life, Molly, unfailingly kind, has a childlike trust in everyone she meets, deserved or not.

The orderly life Molly has struggled to maintain since Gran's passing is thrown into upheaval one fateful morning. She enters the suite of the wealthy and thoroughly unpleasant Charles Black to find the room in disarray, Mr. Black dead on the bed and no sign of his beautiful, much younger second wife, Giselle.

Molly's oddly matter-of-fact response to finding a dead body in a room she's scheduled to clean, coupled with the discovery by police that a drug ring has been operating in the hotel, cause them to zero in on Molly. Soon enough, to the delight of other people at the hotel, Molly lands at the top of the list of suspects for Mr. Black's murder.

Luckily, Molly does have a few friends at the hotel, including the doorman Mr. Preston, dishwasher Juan Manuel, bartender Rodney and of course the beautiful Giselle, one of the only hotel guests to actually see Molly as a person and not just a maid. Now if Molly can just figure out which of these friends she can actually trust, because someone would be only too happy for her to take the fall for the murder.

Readers who enjoyed Gail Honeyman's "Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine" will enjoy Nita Prose's take on a character trying to make her way in a world that doesn't always make sense while also racing to solve a puzzling mystery. Full of dark humor and great secondary characters, this was a delight to read.

Lisa Sanning is Adult Services librarian at Missouri River Regional Library.