60 pages • 2-hour read
The Maid's Secret
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Background
Series Context: The Molly the Maid Mysteries
The Maid’s Secret is the third novel—and fourth book—in author Nita Prose’s Molly the Maid series. The series began with 2022’s The Maid. In this first novel, protagonist Molly Gray, a maid at the upscale Regency Grand Hotel, discovers that one of the hotel’s most valued guests—Mr. Black—has been killed. Molly quickly becomes the main suspect and must investigate to clear her name. The process of finding the real culprit is complicated for Molly because her unique perspective can create social difficulties, isolating her from others and sometimes making her vulnerable to the less scrupulous—but eventually, she solves the mystery. As she does so, she discovers her strength and who her true friends really are. The Maid was a popular bestseller, winning the Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction, the Barry Award for Best First Mystery, the Fingerprint Award for Debut Novel of the Year, and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. It was also a finalist for the 2023 Edgar Award, and a film adaptation of the novel is scheduled to be released in 2026.
Prose followed The Maid with The Mystery Guest: A Maid Novel in 2024, which won the Crime Writers of Canada Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery. Shortly afterward, she published a novella, The Mistletoe Mystery, which is a holiday-themed short work that focuses on Molly’s romantic relationship with fellow Regency Grand Hotel employee Juan Manuel.
Each of the Molly the Maid books can be read as a stand-alone story, but characters, motifs, and plot elements recur from book to book. For instance, The Maid opens just after the death of Molly’s beloved Gran, whose influence on Molly becomes a motif throughout the series. In The Maid’s Secret, Gran’s newly revealed diary is an important source of information as Molly tries to solve the mystery of the Fabergé egg. This secondary narration by Gran fleshes out her backstory and explains why so much about Molly’s family history has been hidden from her. It also explains how John Preston—the hotel employee that, in The Mystery Guest, is revealed to be Molly’s grandfather—came into Gran’s life. Another allusion to The Mystery Guest appears in Chapter 5 of The Maid’s Secret when the death of J. G. Grimthorpe at the Regency Grand is discussed.
Genre Context: Cozy Mysteries and Feel-Good Fiction
Cozy mysteries are a subgenre that features amateur detectives, often reluctantly forced by circumstances to investigate a crime. These mysteries are “cozy” in that they focus on ordinary people and settings and lack jarring elements like graphic sex and violence. Often, the characters are likable and funny, and the settings are charming. The plots of cozies tend to be character-driven and focused on problem-solving and relationships. Popular examples of the cozy subgenre are Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Dial A for Aunties, Kristen Perrin’s How to Solve Your Own Murder, and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club.
Feel-good fiction—also sometimes called “UpLit”—is a subgenre that aims to create positive, uplifting feelings in the reader by combining an optimistic and empathetic outlook with content that might otherwise be considered troubling or difficult. Character relationships are centered, and good people are depicted overcoming their obstacles with humor and determination. Plots tend to be resolved in ways that create a sense of justice and satisfaction that the world operates as it should. Heartwarming stories like Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, T. J, Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time are often cited as key examples of feel-good fiction.
In an interview with South Africa’s TimesLIVE, author Nita Prose explains that she intends the Molly Gray books to be a blend of both cozy mystery and feel-good fiction: She hopes that The Maid is “an uplifting read […] one in which the mystery can only be solved through connection to the human heart” (“Q & A with Nita Prose, author of The Maid.” Sunday Star-Times. 11 Mar. 2022). In The Maid’s Secret, Prose follows this same formula, blending the two subgenres. The novel centers on solving a mystery but does not contain graphic elements. Instead, it focuses on Molly’s process of problem-solving and her relationships with other characters. It combines difficult subject matter like family trauma, crime, and the class divide with a portrait of a hard-working and ethical main character who ultimately triumphs over adversity by staying true to her core principles, showing that good people are ultimately rewarded for their goodness.
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