- The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. $32.99.
Alex Michaelides' debut novel, The Silent Patient, was an international bestseller, which sold over 1 million copies worldwide.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Michaelides has an MA in English Literature from Cambridge University but he also studied psychotherapy for three years, working for two year at a secure unit for young adults. He has drawn on his experiences in both The Silent Patient and in his latest novel, The Maidens.
Michaelides has confessed to "devouring" thrillers in his youth and that his ambition has always been to emulate the classic mysteries of the Agatha Christie era. Hence the setting of The Maidens, a Cambridge University College because it is "an isolated location, like an isolated house, a train, a private island...a closed-off world".
Mariana Athos, a psychotherapist, is mourning the death of her beloved husband Sebastian, drowned off the Greek Island of Naxos.
Tragedy has been an inescapable part of her life and she feels that she has "been cursed, as if by some malevolent goddess in a Greek myth to lose everything she ever loved".
Since Sebastian's death she "no longer saw the world in colour. ...She wanted to hide from the world, all its noise and pain, and cocoon herself in her work".
However, when her niece Zoe, a student at St Christopher's College calls her, distraught, because her friend Tara has been murdered, Mariana returns to Cambridge and the college where she had also been a student.
Zoe is convinced Tara has been murdered by the charismatic Professor of English, Edward Fosca, who lectures on Greek Tragedy.
Fosca is "handsome, in his early forties, tall with strong cheek bones and striking dark eyes. Everything about him was dark, his black eyes, his beard, his clothes."
Tara was one of Fosca's "favourites", one of the "Maidens", a private, all-female study group who are not only self-assured but elegantly dressed and all from privileged backgrounds. "Most distinctive of all was the way they held themselves; with an obvious air of confidence, even superiority".
The police refuse to believe Zoe and, when another of the Maidens is found similarly murdered, Mariana begins her own investigation into the secretive group and the sinister Fosca.
In The Maidens, Michaelides brings together many recognisable elements of the classic murder mystery: the fragile detective; the enigmatic villain; the secret society; the ritualistic murders, all mixed with references to Greek Tragedy and sacrificed maidens.
It should work and it does, until the end, which could lead to a variety of reactions depending on the reader.
For this reviewer, it was an incredulous OMG.