The Maid’s Diary by Loreth Anne White
This book is billed as “psychological suspense,” but that description doesn’t fully capture the incredible layers of suspense—and psychological twists and turns—the story offers.
The plot of the book is complex and involves an intermingling of the past and the present in a way that’s shocking and totally satisfying for lovers of psychological thrillers. There is a tight cast of primary characters: a former Olympic gold-medal skier, his pregnant wife, the wife’s pregnant friend, an elderly lady with dementia, the lead investigator on this mind-bending case, and, of course, the maid.
Trying to summarize the plot of the book would be giving away too much of it, so I’ll just reiterate what the Amazon blurb says: the story is about a maid, Kit, with a snooping problem and a client with a past the color of onyx. Kit is about to get herself into a very dangerous situation, one from which she knows she might not survive. Because someone will stop at nothing to keep that dark past hidden.
There’s a lot to unpack in the book. At its heart is the notion that things are never as they seem. People offer carefully curated illusions of themselves and present those illusions to the world as fact. The rest of the world is drawn in by the beauty and perfection and fairytales people create, and don’t bother (or perhaps don’t want) to look further, to see the beast hiding behind the beauty or the ogre hiding in the fairytale.
The book is written from multiple points of view: an unknown person, the maid, the elderly woman, the lead investigator, the skier, his wife, and a photographer. I found the head-hopping easy to follow because the characters are all so different, but people who do not love head-hopping should be aware of this. There are scenes that address brutal sexual assault, though not in graphic detail. Readers who are particularly sensitive to this topic also need to be aware of it.
There are enough twists in this book to give one whiplash, and I loved it. The story unfolds at just the right pace, with bits of backstory being tantalizingly fed to the reader as the chapters progress. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves psychological suspense, to people who like mysteries told from various points of view, and to anyone who wonders what really goes on in the lives of people we follow online.
Reade and Write 