Nita Prose's The Maid

 

By Margaret S. Hamilton

 

Twenty-five-year-old Molly Gray resides in an unidentified city, probably in Canada, where author Nita Prose lives, and works as a hotel maid. Since her grandmother’s recent death, she lives alone and has no friends. Clad in her immaculate white uniform shirt and black pencil skirt, washed and pressed daily by the hotel laundry, she is invisible to others, a cleaner lugging her cart on and off the hotel elevators:

 

I am your maid. I’m the one who cleans your hotel room, who enters like a phantom when you’re out gallivanting for the day, no care at all about what you’ve left behind, the mess, or what I might see when you’re gone. I’m the one who empties your trash, tossing out the receipts you don’t want anyone to discover. I’m the one who changes your sheets, who can tell if you slept in them and if you were alone last night. I’m the one who straightens your shoes by the door, who puffs up your pillows and finds stray hairs on them. Yours? Not likely. (p.6)

 

Molly is neurodivergent, obsessive about her cleaning, and a slave to etiquette. She is quiet and conscientious, the ideal hotel employee—until she finds a wealthy hotel patron, Charles Black, dead in his bed. Molly, who is perceived as odd by other employees, is the perfect suspect. After she is arrested and appears in court wearing her grandmother’s pajamas printed with teapots, she is released on bail.

 

Molly learns she has friends who want to help her: Mr. Preston, the hotel doorman, and his criminal defense attorney daughter, Charlotte; and Juan Manual, a hotel dishwasher. Rodney, the hotel bartender, is involved with nefarious doings at the hotel, possibly related to Mr. Black’s untimely demise. A trap is set and the real culprit in Mr. Black’s death is identified and charged. But only Molly knows the whole truth about what happened in Mr. Black’s hotel suite that fateful morning.

 

Nita Prose’s writing is lucid and precise, flowing seamlessly between past and present. Molly’s gran taught her to use quirky British terms and aphorisms. Molly is plucky, a heroine from a past age, who, by the end of the book, becomes her own woman. She receives a promotion at the hotel and plans to continue working toward her university degree in hotel management.

 

Though Molly is an appealing neurodivergent character, she lacks the sass and bite of Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant. Eleanor is older, better educated, and more independent than Molly. I find Eleanor compelling, but she does lack Molly’s charming naivete.

 

Nita Prose delivers a good overview of the life of a hotel maid—the procedures and cleaning supplies, interactions with hotel guests, and the all-important monetary tips they leave. However, after spending a summer working as a motel maid, I know that a single cleaner can only clean one room every half hour (bathroom, fresh sheets and towels, thorough vacuuming and dusting), or eight rooms a day. Molly’s workload is unrealistic.

Readers and writers, have you ever worked at a hotel? How would you set a “Clue” style murder mystery in a hotel or in an “Only Murders in the Building” style plot?