The Mystery Guest – Nita Prose

Published By: HarperCollins
Pages: 416
Released On: 18/01/2024

Molly Gray wears her Head Maid badge proudly for every shift at the Regency Grand Hotel, plumping pillows, sweeping up the guests’ secrets, silently restoring rooms to a state of perfection.

But when a renowned guest – a famous mystery writer – drops very dead in the grand tea room, Molly has an unusual clean-up on her hands.

As rumours and suspicion swirl in the hotel corridors, it’s clear there’s grime lurking beneath the gilt. And Molly knows that she alone holds the key to the mystery. But unlocking it means thinking about the past, about Gran, and everything else she’s kept tidied away in her memory for so long.

Because Molly knew the dead guest once upon a time – and he knew her . . .

*****

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

The Maid was one of my favourite reads of 2021. I absolutely loved it, and was thrilled to receive a copy of the sequel.

I know it’s not very literary to say, and there will be more detail in this review as it goes on, but at the very simple level, this is a very good book. With great writing, intriguing characters, a thrilling whodunnit. It is just a very enjoyable read.

It has everything that made The Maid such an amazing read, but with added extras. It has that extra that comes with experience. It’s not better than The Maid as such, because I thought that was very good, but this just adds to the world that Nita has created.

I read The Maid nearly two years ago now (at time of writing), and so I was worried that I wouldn’t remember enough of it. But I shouldn’t have worried. It immediately sucked me back in. It’s like I’ve never been away. I was thrown straight back in and it was entertaining from the off.

Molly is still a fabulous character and she is instantly fully formed. Whether it’s from reading the first book and therefore already knowing her, or whether it’s just Nita’s character creation, Molly is right there from page 1 in all her glory. Some may say she’s an unusual character, strange, weird, annoying, pedantic etc. There’s clearly some neurodiversity going on. I for one really love her. Yes she is different, she is a bit odd, yes she lacks certain social skills, but she’s just one of the most fantastically created characters and I really enjoy reading her.

There are two timelines in this book. One in the present, and the other titled “before” which follows Molly as a child. It really helps flesh out the character of Molly and explains why she is the way she is, and why she takes such care and attention in a – some would say menial – profession.

This one had more heart to it. That’s not to say The Maid didn’t, not at all. But the time Nita has spent with Molly, got to know her, fleshed her out a bit, it means we as readers get more out of her and it feels so much deeper and layered, and more human and relatable.

You would think that the more crime and murder mystery whodunnit books I read, the more obvious it would become as to how the writer manages to write it so well. But I’m still amazed. To write one that is gripping, layered, exciting, not obvious but realistic…I can’t even being to think how. I started writing a whodunnit book once in the Miss Marple style, but I found it so difficult to keep the killer hidden, but with enough clues to suggest red herrings etc.

Whodunnits can feel like a slog to get through, bogged down with necessary (and sometimes unnecessary) detail, and you end up just wanting to skip to the conclusion. But this felt the opposite. I read it in less than 24 hours. It was so gripping that, yes, I did want to get to the end to find out who did it, but I wanted to get there via every single page.

I won’t spoil the ending, obviously, as that sort of ruins the whole point of a whodunnit, but there’s loads of twists and turns and red herrings and possible culprits and secrets. And again, I feel I should be getting better at discovering the answer seeing how many I read, but I did not see it coming at all, so all in all a very successful whodunnit.

I do wonder if we will get any more of Molly in the future, or whether there’s a limit on how much death that can happen at one hotel before it shuts down. Who knows. Only Nita knows. But whatever she chooses to do, I’ll definitely be in that queue to get my hands on it.

I think I’ve said that word ‘whodunnit’ in this review too much, and now it doesn’t feel like a real word.