Book Review: “The Mystery Guest” by Nita Prose
Molly Maid Part Two
The following isn’t meant to be churlish in the least, but The Mystery Guest is, in many ways, an unnecessary book. It is a sequel to Nita Prose’s bestselling The Maid. That book was, in many ways, so perfect that it didn’t require a sequel. It had a “happily ever after” ending with a few twists, and Prose (whose real name is Nita Pronovost) had seemingly used up a whole book’s worth of puns and double entendres. Surely, it would be impossible to recapture lightning in a bottle, right? Well, as is the case with most sequels, The Mystery Guest doesn’t improve on its predecessor. To be honest, some of the magic has seeped out of the concept: a maid who may exist somewhere on the autism spectrum finds herself in the center of a murder investigation. That’s not to say that the sequel isn’t fun or doesn’t have positive attributes. However, one must approach this book with lowered expectations, because the work isn’t quite as on par with The Maid. The originality and freshness of that novel just aren’t here. Still, if you clamored for more of the same, The Mystery Guest is enjoyable enough. One must wonder how many times the main character’s hotel workplace is going to be the site of murders, but if you overlook that aspect and don’t wear too much of a critical thinking hat, The Mystery Guest brings the same warmth and humor as the previous book.
Set some time after the events of The Maid, Molly (the main character) is back in the crosshairs of the police when an extremely famous mystery author who lives in her city arrives at the hotel to give a press conference where he will make a very important announcement. The police take an interest in her maid-in-training Lily when it is discovered that the honey pot used for the mystery author’s tea contained antifreeze, meaning that said author dropped dead upon taking a sip of tea laced with honey at said press conference — the reason for Molly being once again the target of a murder investigation. However, Molly worked in the author’s mansion as a child and had something of a relationship with the man. Thus, the novel is told both from the present point-of-view and also as flashbacks. Beloved characters reappear such as Molly’s now deceased Gran (who appears in those flashbacks) and Mr. Preston, the friendly doorman of the hotel — who is hiding a secret of his own this time out.
Overall, The Mystery Guest is a pleasant sequel. The thing with this book is that it’s exciting to watch the main character once again go through the motions of being awkward and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. While these novels never explicitly say that Molly is a high-functioning autistic, she has all the characteristics of someone who does. And she makes for an entertaining character. The nice thing about The Mystery Guest is that it is refreshingly positive. It’s a book where, no matter what bad things may befall its lovable characters, it is meant to uplift and make the reader feel good about themselves. For those reasons, fans of The Maid will be clamoring for more of this stuff and will gobble down The Mystery Guest with delight. However, as noted earlier, some of the freshness of the concept has evaporated and there’s a bit of a feeling of going through the motions with this one. As well, The Mystery Guest suffers from a touch of silliness, such as when members of the deceased author’s fan club mistake Molly for a police detective working undercover. Also, the book sometimes veers into caricature, such as making its mystery author so famous that his mansion rivals something out of Stephen King’s home complete with a bookcase that reveals hidden rooms.
Still, even though The Mystery Guest is yet another sequel that doesn’t live up to the originality of its original, it’s a book that the reader doesn’t have to think about too much. Since this is a work about authors and the mystery of how they power the written word, it may turn readers onto other works of fiction, including classics such as Great Expectations, whose significance permeates this book. And even though the world may have not been crying out for The Mystery Guest, which at times feels more like a coda to The Maid rather than its standalone work, we need more books that look at the positive side of life — which this book does (if you overlook the fact that someone is murdered during its pages). So, if you like cozy mysteries with bloodless corpses, you’re probably going to be enchanted by The Mystery Guest almost as much as you were by The Maid.
Even though there’s a sense that Prose has run out of things to say about her characters to some extent — and one of her more beloved characters from the first book, Molly’s boyfriend Juan, is missing from the narrative (away visiting family in Mexico) — The Mystery Guest is worth reading if you want to know what happened to the people who populated its predecessor’s pages. And if you don’t like the idea of your favorite book having a sequel, you can always just pretend that this one doesn’t exist. That all said, even though The Mystery Guest doesn’t quite hold a candle to The Maid, it’s still a tick better than most thrillers that come out. It’ll be neat to see where Prose goes from here — if The Maid becomes a trilogy or if she writes something new and original. For the time being, we have The Mystery Guest, like it or not, and it is a passable sequel to a true original. Put another way, it is what it is, and you’ll just have to leave things at that.
Nita Prose’s The Mystery Guest: A Maid Mystery will be published by Viking / Penguin Random House Canada on November 28, 2023.
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