Published By: HarperCollins
Pages: 384
Released On: 10/04/2025
Molly the maid is no stranger to secrets…
She sees everything behind closed doors at the Regency Grand hotel: wiping away the dust and grime of guests passing through. But one secret lies much closer to home.
An old trinket – a faux Fabergé egg – is revealed to be a precious antique during an appraisal at the hotel, making Molly a rags-to-riches sensation. But no sooner has the egg shown its value than it’s stolen: vanishing without a trace.
Determined to crack the case of the missing Fabergé, Molly begins dusting for clues – uncovering a mystery that stretches deep into the past.
For in the pages of a long-forgotten diary, written by her late gran, lie the secrets that could unlock all others – and only Molly holds the key…
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
Oh I absolutely love this series; it’s got everything you want from a mystery and has this nostalgic feeling that harks back to the days of Agatha Christie.
I absolutely love this series. Firstly we get The Maid, followed by The Mystery Guest, and then this installment. It’s got everything I want from a crime mystery book. It has elements of the classic whodunnits but with enough modern elements to make it fresh.
Molly is one of the best fictional characters I’ve read in a long time. She’s got such depth and she’s very real, very flawed. Whilst it’s not stated explicitly, Molly clearly has some neurodiverse tendencies and I think it’s important to see that in a main character in a mainstream book.
There are a lot of other characters in this. We’ve got the cast we’ve come to know and love, but we’ve also got a handful of new ones. This gives it a sense of familiarity without being a carbon copy.
Where this one differs from the previous books is we get a bit of Molly’s family history in the form of a diary her late grandmother kept. It’s like a story within a story. Those scenes often made me feel uncomfortable; the people and the goings on were not always pleasant. But it’s very well written, and so Nita has done a good job at depicting that. It doesn’t say what year it was set – or if it did I missed it – but it’s clearly of an age where Molly’s gran was expected to fit into society’s expectations of a woman. We have previously only known of her gran through Molly, but this let her have a bigger part, and I noticed some similarities between her and Molly, which was nice.
It’s like a locked room mystery in a way, even though it’s not in a locked room. But a crime where everyone is accounted for, everyone is looking upon it. It should have been impossible.
It was such a uplifting book. Yes there’s the crime, obviously, but that’s almost background. This is about family and friends, love, new love, old love, lost love, about righting wrongs; and unexpectedly moving.
I have heard rumours that this is the last book in the series, and if it is, then it’s perfectly ended, but I wouldn’t be unhappy if there were more.
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