The Maid

There is this new European regulation that says that almond-based beverages cannot be refered to as "milk" because they aren't milk. Well, I think this shouldn't be called a novel either. It should be branded as "editorial product" and include a mention "may contain trace amounts of literature" (don't worry, there are barely any). This is SO bad that the only thing that kept me reading was the morbid curiosity of seeing how bad it could get. It is the textual equivalent of watching a Ramsay's Kitchen nightmares episode. - Molly, the Maid (yes, like the cleaning company) is a maid whose only interest in life is cleaning ; she ends up dating a guy who works as a dishwasher, who loves doing the dishes in his free time. This is the level of character building you can expect from this book. - The plot doesn't make any sense: At some point, the police finds drugs and a gun in her belongings and they charge her with a murder where the victim was killed by suffocation? Shouldn't they at least charge her with something related to the gun and drugs? Worse than that: we are told that the obvious suspect who tried to frame her didn't even commit the crime. Then why did they even try to frame her?! - In a murder novel you expect to get some evidence so you can try to figure out what happened. Here you have none. You're always lost in the main character's dumb reflections and just told what happened at the end. - The author didn't research her subject at all. She doesn't know how a hotel works, how drug trafficking works, how the police work or the justice system... The fact that the story doesn't happen anywhere in particular (it could be North America or the UK depending on the paragraph) probably doesn't help. To be fair, the author doesn't seem to ever have met anybody in her life, as none of her characters is remotely believable. - The protagonist is heavily portrayed as showing some sort of neuroatypical disorder that nobody seems able to acknowledge. But her real problem is that she's dumb: she behaves as only a character in a porn movie would. For exemple: she finds 4 suspicious men doing something obviously dodgy in a hotel room full of "white powder" and not only she decides to clean the room for them that day but to do it every day without any kind of compensation (apart the pleasure of cleaning, of course)? Incidently, how inexpensive is cocaine in this imaginary country, that allows traffickers to keep spilling it around everyday, wherever they go? - The worse part is the political ground in which the whole thing is based, which is strongly reminiscent of the tabloid speech and the far-right: you have a couple of hard-working decent people who really struggle to get around in their life, but they they are hindered by the lazy (housekeeper), the people always on their throats (landlord), the mean bullies (colleagues), the people stealing from them (the housekeeper again) or just plain con men (the "boyfriends"). But don't worry, just looking at someone you know when they are good (apparently, Juan Manuel is good. This, we know because Molly decided so... and who could contradict such a good judge of character?). In the end, what strikes me the most is the fact that the novel doesn't even deal with its premise: the selling point of the book is that hotel housekeeping know more about their clients that you may think. What a great pitch for a murder novel! But forget about it : if you expected a real novel in which housekeepers actually knew stuff about people that could became relevant in a murder investigation... keep looking, because this one simply has no clue of what is going on in her own life. Gosh, I can't wait for IA to take over.