The protagonist narrator, Molly, is a neurodivergent young lady working as a hotel Maid. As a character she is reminiscent of Don in The Rosie Project or Christopher from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time—someone who interprets the world around her quite literally and so has trouble reading and understanding people. Molly’s grandmother, who raised her, was vital in helping her navigate the world. But she has recently passed leaving her quite alone. Molly is surrounded by several characters at her work: some who wish to take advantage of her and those that are protective of her. And of course, she can’t tell the difference. 

It’s hard not to feel immediate compassion for Molly and start rooting for her when reading about the world as seen from her eyes—esp. when she becomes a suspect in the murder of a well healed guest at the Hotel she works at. 

<Spoiler Alert>The problem with the book after building up to what should have been an interesting climax, is the unraveling and fall from grace in the last 30 pages, when it is revealed that Molly is an entirely unreliable narrator who knew who the murderer was all along! And she not only withholds this information from the police (and the readers) but also lies under oath. This is completely out of the character for someone who is presumably on the spectrum and speaks and conducts herself quite honestly. Yikes! <end Spoiler Alert>

There exists an unwritten pact that a mystery writer will not pull any ridiculous contrivance for an ending—that the mystery is solved due to the ingenuity of the characters using all the information already made available to the reader. Nita Prose’s The Maid breaks that with a colossal and unforgivable deceit. 

There are those who say the book is uplifting and has a heart. That it might. But it comes at the cost of hurting the reader’s brain (and not in a good way).