The Maid by Nita Prose

Ballantine Books, 304 pages, $27

“The Maid” sets an impossible level of cleanliness and joy for hotel and motel cleaning people to reach. Molly Gray, the maid in this book by Canadian Nita Prose, aspires to perfection in cleaning the rooms in the Regency Grand Hotel. The city which is home for the hotel is never named. That’s too bad because I’d stay there — except for the murder and criminal shenanigans, that is. Right, it’s fiction anyway.

In many ways, except for a puzzling bit at the end — I’ll get to that as a spoiler — it was a perfect, soothing book. Molly is someone to love and admire. She has social problems. She can’t read people’s expressions and cannot judge the intention of people speaking to her. She pretty much takes everything at face value, insofar as she can figure out what the face is doing. Before her grandmother died, Molly could bring the questions from her day’s activities home and have her grandmother explain the cues Molly missed. It looks as though Molly is on the autism spectrum, although author Prose doesn’t say that explicitly.

Molly’s grandmother was a  housekeeper for rich people, and she taught Molly the right way to clean. Taking the job at the Regency is a no-brainer, especially since one of her grandmother’s dear friends is Mr. Preston, the doorman, and he can help look after Molly, not that there’s anything wrong with Molly’s brain, just her understanding of social interactions and her anxiety issues.

The story begins after Molly’s grandmother has been dead for a few months. Having been swindled out of her grandmother’s savings and no longer having her grandmother’s paycheck, Molly has found herself in a financial quandary. She can no longer afford to live in her apartment, run down and overpriced though it is. The bright spot in her life is cleaning rooms at her second home: the Regency.

A lot of the staff dismiss Molly. She is invisible to most of the rest of the world, but that’s the way she likes it. She gets along with a couple of the other maids, but her supervisor is conniving, unkind, and a cheat. Molly just keeps her head down and takes pride in what she does, even when she knows her boss is stealing the tip money from her and the other maids.

One of the bright spots in Molly’s cleaning day is doing the Blacks’ suite. Mr. Black is rich, an important man, by his own lights, and has a beautiful, much younger wife. They stay at the hotel often while Mr. Black transacts business. His wife, Giselle, relies on the company of Molly when she comes to clean. Molly considers her a friend. But how much of a friend can a rich woman be to a hotel maid?

One day, when Molly has to return to the Blacks’ suite to finish cleaning, she finds the body of Mr. Black sprawled across the bed and Mrs. Black nowhere in sight. He is dead. When she calls the “penguins” at the front desk in a panic, they ignore her. She faints. When she recovers, Mr. Black is still dead. This time, Molly asks for the manager, Mr. Snow, and finally, the police and ambulance arrive. Eventually, it is determined Mr. Black was murdered.

A severe, no-nonsense police detective interviews Molly. She doesn’t catch on that Molly’s perspective is different than most people’s and decides that Molly is a suspicious person. Readers know Molly is the most innocent, naive, truthful, loyal person around. Maybe. The book is told in her voice, so just how reliable is she?

The other hotel characters are Juan Manuel, the dishwasher, and Rodney, the bartender. Molly has a crush on Rodney and has misinterpreted what he has said to her in the past. Other than when she is in the hotel, Molly now leads a lonely, isolated life. At one point, someone hugs Molly and she reflects on how long it has been since someone has touched her. Heartbreaking.

This is not a sad book, however. Yes, Molly gets into jams because of how she misunderstands people and situations, and she is sad when she finds out something is not what it seemed. But she is resilient. She hears her grandmother’s voice in her head, full of grandmotherly advice, when the going gets rocky. She takes great comfort in structure and cleanliness. For instance, she takes off her shoes every night when she gets back to her apartment, wipes the soles, and puts them in her closet. That sort of detail is endearing to me.

As expected, Molly gets into hot water over Mr. Black’s death and it is no surprise to mystery readers when she becomes the prime suspect. At her lowest point, she wonders who she can turn to for help in her restricted world. Surprises await. The best surprise is how deep the book bores into Molly's life without over-narrating those parts.

I highly recommend “The Maid.” I thought it was charming. I like to read about characters cleaning things. I love Marie Kondo (although I must say, desire and practice may have a wide chasm between them in my real world). A shiny, dustless MBTB star for “The Maid,” the first of 2022! (Plus, what a great cover!)

Kind of a SPOILER:

Towards the end, Molly is in court. One of the attorneys is Charlotte. Why? Is Canadian law different from U.S. law? If the story takes place in a fictional country, are their trials held in a different fashion? Is dispensation given to Molly to have Charlotte question her? Huh?

The Trees by Percival Everett

Graywolf Press, 288 pages, $16 (c2021)

Talk about unexpected! I expected a mystery and I got a mystery, but it wasn’t the one I could have envisioned in a million years. Make that two million years.

A White S***head Redneck Peckerwood has been murdered in Money, Mississippi. He has barbed wire wrapped around his neck. He is (ahem, polite euphemism) mutilated. Nearby is a corpse of a Black man holding onto the Peckerwood’s missing pieces. They killed each other maybe? Later it is determined the dead Black man has been dead a lot longer than the Peckerwood. The hunt is on. Then the corpse of the Black man disappears from the coroner’s refrigerator. The coroner is a sloppy White S***head Redneck Peckerwood, so maybe it was just an unfortunate oversight. Then a second WSRP is murdered and, oo-wee, there’s the same Black corpse again, this time holding onto the new WSRP’s pieces.

My thoughts may have roamed to zombies. I thought, okay, that’ll do as well. Southern mystery mutated into a horror story. Yay.

Called to solve the mysteries are Mississippi Bureau of Investigation agents, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, because Money Sheriff Jetty is dumbfounded, confounded, and unmoored. Plus, he might be a WSRP himself. His deputies certainly are. Among the conversations reported by the author among the pertinent white locals is a liberal use of the N-word. Morgan and Davis are Black. No offense, one of the deputies says at one point after a slip-o-the-tongue. None taken, the agent deadpans.

Hey, more than one person notes, the Black corpse looks vaguely like Emmett Till. And what were the names of the deceased WSRPs? Milam and Brady.

Let’s step aside a moment for some history. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. The white woman at the cash register of the store Emmett entered said he spoke inappropriately to her. She also may have alleged inappropriate physical contact by Till. Later, the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and J.W. Milam (and probably others) took Emmett from his relatives’ home and tortured and murdered him. Neither Bryant nor Milam were held to account for their actions. And that’s the way it was.

In real-life, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant are long dead, but Carolyn Bryant, the woman at the register who started the whole series of actions that led to Emmett’s death, is still alive. According to Timothy B. Tyson, the author of a book about Emmett Till’s murder, Carolyn admitted to him that Emmett had done nothing to her. It was a lie that he had verbally or physically assaulted her.

Back to the book, which is set in modern times. A fictionalized version of Carolyn Bryant briefly appears as a character in “The Trees.” She is the first to note the connection between herself and the dead men, and is afraid whatever came for them will also come for her.

Agents Morgan and Davis shake their heads, join forces with an FBI agent, Herberta (“Herbie,” curse her parents) Hind, and plod forward to make what they can of the deaths and the disappearing Black corpse.

It is somewhere around here that I stopped believing this was going to be a typical murder mystery or horror book. How a horror book can be “typical,” I don’t know, since there are no holds barred in a horror story, but nevertheless, there I was.

Are you white and believe you are superior to non-whites? Are you a believer in the politics of Donald Trump? Are you someone who thinks you aren’t a racist, but like Amy Cooper (the Central Park dog walker and alarmist), you have an unacknowledged underlying psychopathy? If yes, then this book is probably not for you. The book points a harsh finger at people with those beliefs.

The concluding events come fast and furious. The lesson author Percival Everett has for his readers is not how to deconstruct a murder but how to stare a historical shame in the face. You may have come for the fiction, but you will stay for the truth.

Also stay to appreciate how the characters’ names get weirder and weirder. For instance: Helvetica Quip, The Doctor Reverend (neither of which is true) Cad Fondle (and his wife, Fancel), Damon Thruff, Chester Hobnobber, Ho Chi Minh, and many more. Jim Davis and Ed Morgan are purposely bland in contrast.

One of the thoughts that bubbled in my head about a quarter of the way through the book were the lyrics of the song, “Strange Fruit,” once upon a time banned from airplay — maybe still banned, I don’t know. The version sung by Billie Holiday is haunting. I think that thought was influenced by the book’s title. Also, the fictional Bryant and Milam victims are part of Emmett Till’s killers’ fictional family tree. Whatever. Hold that thought in your head should you continue through to the end.

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Riverhead Books, 272 pages, $28 (c2021)

The subtitle of “Matrix” should be, “No, not the movie and no, nothing to do with math or rocks.” I will also add, no, this is not a mystery.

I loved this book. I think I’m allowed to love books that aren’t mysteries. (I’ll check my contract.*)

The story is set in the 1100s in England. It’s about an indomitable girl who grows up in France and becomes a powerful abbess in England. It’s sad sometimes. It’s lyrical always.

Marie de France is tall, sturdy, and unlikely to have songs written about her beauty. She is related to Eleanor of Aquitaine by way of being the illegitimate child of the old king. She is also said to be from the line of the fairy Mélusine.

Here’s a description of Marie when she arrived at Eleanor’s court, an orphan too young to hold on to her mother’s estate in France:

… Marie appalled everyone with her ravenousness, her rawness, her gauche bigboned body; where most privileges accorded her royal blood she lost due to the faults of her person.

Matrix is the mother. Marie is the matrix of the abbey.

* Just joking.