The Maidens: Excellent Writing, Mediocre Mystery

 

THE MAIDENS (2021)

By Alex Michaelides

Celadon Books, 352 pages.

★★★

 

 

 

The Maidens opens with these lines: "Edward Fosca was a murderer. This wasn't something Mariana knew just on an intellectual level…. Her body knew it. She felt it in her bones, along her blood, and deep in every cell.”

 

When I read something like that, I can smell the Egg MacGuffins sizzling on a greasy grill. Author Alex Michaelides scored with his previous novel The Silent Patient (2019) and like it, The Maidens is smart and well written. That does not mean, though, that it's a good mystery. I read a lot of mysteries and often figure them out before the Big Reveal, but it's rare that I finger the murderer 40 pages into a 352-page book. Alas, to use a Millennial phrase, the culprit in The Maidens is obvi. I finished it for the sheer pleasure of the prose, its setting at Cambridge University, and its forays into Greek mythology.

 

Speaking of Greeks, protagonist Mariana is Greek, though a long-time English resident. She was born in Athens to hard-working father who made a lot of money in the shipping trade. He was also a tyrant whose wife skipped out on him and left Mariana behind. Mariana couldn't wait to bolt to London and begin a new life. At 19, she met Sebastian at Cambridge University, and the two soon married. At 36, however, she is a widow, Sebastian having drowned on a vacation on Naxos. Mariana abandoned her literature and classics studies to train as a therapist and now runs group sessions, though we infer she's not very good at them. We watch as she fumbles attempts to set boundaries for Henry, a deeply troubled man who talks a good line of violence.

 

Real violence intervenes when her adoptive niece Zoe calls from Cambridge and frantically tells her that her best friend Tara is missing. In good compassionate style, Mariana buys a train ticket and sets off to comfort Zoe. Too late; Tara’s body has been discovered. This is the set up for the book’s namesake maidens, which are linked to the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, the latter of whom was kidnapped by Hades. (If your mythology is rusty, the story is a metaphor for winter and spring.) In Greek Persephone is called “kore,” or “maiden.”

 

In the novel, the term is in the plural; the maidens are the privileged and nubile young female acolytes of star professor Edward Fosca. They hold Fosca, a magnetic personality, in cult-like reverence. Tara was one of the maidens. Mariana hardly helps matters by angering Chief Inspector Sadhu Sangha, who quickly sizes her up and determines she’s prone to hysterics. For once, there’s no sexism at play.

 

There will be more victims before the final knife is plunged and, in addition to Fosca, potential suspects include: the psychotic Henry, drug dealer Ellis, a dodgy porter named Morris, and perhaps Fred, a mathematics graduate student Mariana met on the train from London. Fred insists he's psychic and will one day marry Mariana, though he's seven years younger than she. There are a few other wild cards but as I indicated, it's pretty clear early on who is doing the slicing and dicing.

 

In the end, the biggest mystery is how a writer is gifted as Michaelides could be so clunky with plot development. It certainly doesn’t help when one wonders how anyone as damaged and dense as Mariana could get through a third-rate community college let alone Cambridge. What conclusion would you draw about the identity of a killer who leaves clues in the form of postcards with verses written in ancient Greek? You could certainly disqualify me as a suspect, but I didn’t go to Cambridge!

 

Rob Weir