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The Maidens by Alex Michaelides - Book Review

 The Maidens

By Alex Michaelides

Genre : Suspense, Thriller, Greece, Mythology, Horror, detective, whod-unit, female-oriented, 2021-read

Rating : 4.5/5 👌👌



Woo Hoo! I just finished this book and I feel like I have been taken for quite a ride by the author. He gave my taut imagination a spin making me guess and second guess at a game I eventually lost. He threw me - a hooked reader at that point -  off into wrong directions about who might be the murderer and right enough, I took the bait each time. So as the end was nearing, there were multiple suspects and with a pounding heart, I kept reading ignoring sleep and late hour of the day. But I felt that the end fell a bit flat for me - after all the expectation, it was like an anti-climax.😕 Something that could have been a little different and improvised upon. 🙄🤔 But still, this is one hell of a book!! I thought this engaged me more than his first book The Silent Patient which was a rage and a massive success.


When this book first came out, I ran through some initial reviews which said that the ending was too obvious and it was easy to guess the killer half way through. I don't think so. It definitely wasn't that way for me. I think the whole Greek mythology and building tension in the plot - which is fast paced - gripped me tight.


So the story is this. Mariana and Sebastian meet while they are at college in Cambridge, England and they become instant soul mates. They both have suffered from childhood abuse, loneliness, abandonment and such stuff which draws them closer to each other. They get married after college and start living a dream like life. Both her father and Sebastian die unexpectedly leaving her alone with her niece, Zoe to take care of. So one day when she gets a call from Zoe that her friend at college is brutally murdered, Mariana takes it on herself to help and protect Zoe. The case is closed with a wrong culprit and Mariana resolves to solve it. From the start, she  is convinced of who the murderer is - but she, you see, looks at things from a distorted lens of her own childhood issues. She is a psychotherapist specialising in group therapy but with her own inner psychological demons still unaddressed. Her suspect is a charming, attractive, incredibly smart and talented professor Edward Fosca who teaches Greek Tragedies at the university. He has a group of special students called 'The Maidens' who are very loyal and fearful of him. The girl who is murdered is from this group.  After a couple of other girls from the group are also killed in the same manner, the investigation becomes a hunt for a pathological, serial killer. Is Edward Fosca the one killing these girls? If so, for what motive? If it's not him, then who is the one most to benefit from these killings? Mariana is forced to come to terms with her own follies and prejudices at the end and realise the truth for what it is.

 

I loved the references to Greek mythology - to Demeter and Peresperone, the cult like description of the Maidens, characterization of Mariana and Edward Fosca. I highly recommend this to all the "whod-unit" theme lovers!! 🥳🥳🥳

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