Is The Maid a Cozy Mystery?
If you’re a mystery fan, by now you’ve heard of The Maid by Canadian author Nita Prose.
It has been sitting on top of many lists for several months. It’s been at or close to number one on Amazon’s cozy mystery list since it was released at the start of 2022.
Oh yes, and it’s going to be made into a movie in the next couple of years.
The obvious question for CozyMystery.com is whether The Maid is a Cozy Mystery at all.
(This is a spoiler-free discussion.)
What’s The Maid about?
The story is based around a hotel in a major city. I assumed it was set in New York, but after reading the book I learned it is meant to be Toronto, the author’s home town.
The book features Molly Gray, who works at the hotel as the titular maid.
She presents as neurodivergent, although her actual diagnosis is never explained. She is in some ways a slightly simple character who was raised by her grandmother. This has led Molly to adopt many of the mannerisms of a “proper” person from many decades ago.
Throughout the book I kept feeling it was set in the 1930s, but then someone would use a cellphone, and it would bring me back to the modern day. It was jarring to read this at times.
Molly acts naively throughout the book (which is irritating in some places but endearing in others). There were many times I wanted to tell her to stop what she was doing. If she had just talked to someone about what was happening many of her problems would have been solved. She didn’t for various reasons, and that caused further problems. She didn’t want to bother people, which is part of where she is on the spectrum, I suppose.
And then she discovers a body.
Is The Maid Cozy?
If you look at the listing on Amazon, several Editorial Reviews and some Customer Reviews call the book a cozy mystery. Can they all be wrong?
There are a few problems from our perspective which make us question The Maid’s appearance in the cozy mystery lists.
We see the story from multiple perspectives. We know things she doesn’t know, and there are a couple of reveals which surprise her but had been telegraphed to us long before.
Conversely, even though she is the main character, she knows certain things we don’t know. This makes it significantly more difficult to solve the puzzles. I’m not sure it’s even possible to solve the main puzzle with the information we have. A very mild spoiler: there is a crucial piece of evidence to solving the crime which Molly knows, but we don’t even hear about it until the epilogue.
So let’s go through our list.
Evaluating The Maid as a Cozy Mystery
In our analysis of a book, we go through three major categories. Each has multiple questions, and in some cases a Yes is enough to say the book is Not Cozy, while others require multiple Yes answers.
Most of the questions are subjective, so you might get slightly different results than me, but the overall result should be the same.
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The Dealbreakers
We start with our Dealbreakers, where each is a stumbling block, with a single Yes answer making us say a book is Not Cozy.
There are no Dealbreakers for The Maid which would stop us in our tracks. You could have a reasonable argument about whether Molly is actually investigating the crime (especially when you finish the book), but it might be a stretch.
The Warning Signs
Warning Signs are a little more nebulous. One or two of them might be okay, but more than that would help us conclude a book is Not Cozy.
The Warning Signs are where we break down and admit The Maid is Not Cozy.
The focus of the book is on something other than the puzzle. Perhaps half the book is on other things, from illness to family issues to a completely separate crime which happens alongside the main murder thread.
There are also multiple protagonists, so even though we spend most of our time with Molly, we see other people and things they are doing.
And she definitely knows something we don’t know, and if we’d known it when she knew it, the book would be half the length.
You can get away with one or even two Warning Signs and still call it cozy, but we have four or five.
The How Cozies
The How Cozy questions are a set of twenty questions which tell us just how cozy a book is. The more it gets, the cozier it is.
We’ve already decided The Maid is Not Cozy, but for fun we’ll look at the How Cozies questions. They are quite subjective, but I think we can get to about 8 / 20. That score would put the book near the boundary between being cozy and not cozy at all.
The Verdict on The Maid
Final Verdict: The Maid is Not Cozy.
This book is a good example of one of the biggest problems we have on CozyMystery.com. The term Cozy Mystery is widespread with no actual definition. Many people use it to mean a light and breezy read.
We prefer a much tighter definition. This often puts books the public and many publishers (and authors!) think of as cozy into the margins, or not even cozy at all.
Where would I shelve The Maid in a bookstore? It is a murder mystery, but I think it might fit into the traditional mystery section rather than Cozy Mystery. The problem is it might also fit into the General Fiction area too.
And that’s why you won’t find a Nita Prose author page on CozyMystery.com. Remember, it’s nothing to do with the quality of the book or the story. This was an interesting and enjoyable book to read and talk about. It simply doesn’t fit our detailed requirements to be a Cozy Mystery.
What do you think? Are we being too harsh? Too soft? Let us know.
Do you have anything to say about this article? Agree or disagree with what we have to say? Let us know in the comments below.
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