3.5 stars out of 5
It kicks off with the promise of intrigue: Mariana Andros, whose beloved husband Sebastian died many months ago during a vacation to her native Greece, gets a frantic call from her niece Zoe, a student at Cambridge University. One of her school friends has been murdered. Mariana, once a student at the campus herself (it's where she met Sebastian, the love of her life), doesn't waste much time heading to Cambridge to comfort Zoe.
Mariana is a London-based psychotherapist specializing in groups, and much is made of one of them - a disturbed and disturbing guy who talks and acts like a stalker. Despite the potential for serious disruption to him in particular, though, she abruptly ditches them all and heads to the university. As an aside, based on this and other books I've read, I must say that hanging out a psychotherapist shingle in the U.K. apparently takes far less education than here in the United States, so maybe that's why she saw no problem leaving her patients to fend for themselves while she was away. On the way to Cambridge, she encounters a determined young man named whose words and actions give Mariana the creeps similar to those she got from her patient.
When she arrives, Zoe tells her aunt that the murdered girl, Tara, told her that Edward Fosca had threatened to kill her and is, in fact, Tara's killer. A rather offbeat but extremely popular professor of Greek Tragedy at Cambridge, Fosca has a special following of young female students known as The Maidens. But at least one colleague of Fosca's refutes Zoe's remarks, and the police shut Mariana's theories down from the git-go (it was worthy of note to me that the chief inspector reveals far more information to a suspect that any U.S. cop ever would - but then maybe I've just watched too many TV shows.
Of course, Mariana doesn't believe Fosca protestations of innocence, or the police or university powers-that-be; instead, she's convinced that solving the murder is up to her. As such, she chooses to ignore her groups back home for a while longer to spend a few more days to investigate on her own (at this point, I actually wondered if this is supposed to be a cozy mystery - Mariana fits that heroine pattern perfectly). She soon learns that Fosca's Maidens bear uncanny similarity to relics in the little Greek town where her Sebastian died, making her (and readers) suspect a possible connection. And then, the body of another Maiden turns up.
Mariana's investigation turns up more dead ends than real clues, and her continual digging around becomes offensive to other characters as well (Fosca among them). But like those cozy heroines, she barges ahead even when the police strongly advise her to butt out. All this leads to an action-packed ending that brings at least one relatively unexpected twist.
It was the ending, though, that pretty much did me in. I felt much the same reaction that I had to the April 1978 finale of The Bob Newhart Show when he and his wife, played by the wonderful Suzanne Pleshette, wake up and we all learned that the entire series had been a dream. On the one hand, I applauded the creativity; on the other, I was also frustrated that I, and all the other viewers, had spent four years watching a story that in one sense was totally irrelevant. Such was the case here; the ending brought things to a conclusion of sorts, but also brought the realization that much of what went on before was there as a distraction, not substance. Besides that, one of the crucial time frames simply did not add up unless one of the characters was far more of a pervert that I thought, and I never learned what happened to one of the characters in whom I had an interest.
So while overall this is a decent story - definitely worth a read on a warm summer beach and one I believe many readers will love - it isn't one I'm particularly excited about. I do thank the publisher, via NetGalley, for allowing me to read and review an advance copy.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides (Celadon Books, June 2021); 352 pp.
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