One day, her life is upended when she finds the body of a wealthy tycoon in one of the suites she’s supposed to clean. She is a bit different from most of the staffers at the hotel as she has, one would presume, a touch of autism - she has trouble reading facial expressions and picking up on social cues. The book centers on a 25-year-old woman named Molly who works as a maid at a tony hotel in an unnamed city presumably somewhere in North America. It does have its liabilities, but I wound up getting, well, swept away by the narrative and read most of it in a day. In the end, it probably shouldn’t matter as The Maid is a fun and wildly entertaining cozy mystery thriller.

Now it may be churlish of me to suggest that nepotism is at work here, but I do have to wonder if a writer who didn’t happen to have a major job in the Canadian publishing industry would get the same sort of promotional push. Prose (an obvious pen name, as her real name is Nita Pronovost) is the vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

There might be a reason why the promotion is so heavy and buzz-worthy, aside from the fact that this is a generally good read. That’s how I wound up with the book on my Kindle. I was one of many reviewers contacted on NetGalley - one of the places where I procure free books for review - about the novel, and the first 200 reviewers who inquired about it would automatically get a review copy. The publisher behind Nita Prose’s debut novel, The Maid, is throwing an awful lot of firepower at reviewers in the hopes of bringing the book into the hands of as many readers as possible.

The Maid by Nita Prose