The Maid

The Maid is a murder mystery by the Canadian writer Nita Prose, published in 2022. It is her first novel, and its investigator is a hotel maid who notices everything about a room and very little about the people standing in it.

Molly Gray is twenty-five and works at the Regency Grand Hotel, where she takes pride in her trolley of cleaning supplies and in putting a disturbed room back in order. Her fellow staff find her odd, and they do not share her enthusiasm for the work. Her grandmother, who used to explain other people to her as a set of simple rules, has recently died, and Molly is navigating the world on her own.

One day she goes into the penthouse suite to clean and finds that the hotel's most prestigious guest, Mr Black, has been murdered. A series of unfortunate and partly comic events then makes Molly the prime suspect, which puts both her job and the reputation of the hotel at risk and leaves her working out who is lying to her.