The Maidens

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Mariana Andros is a former Cambridge student, today a successful group therapist, who is still recovering from the loss of her husband a year ago. Her monotonous life is temporarily interrupted when her niece Zoe calls her and tells her Zoe’s best friend Tara has been murdered. They say you always chase your first high. And that's the way it is with me and Alex Michaelides. His first book The Silent Patient is one of my all-time favorites. I still remember the visceral experience of reading that book—the headiness of an unputdownable thriller, the gut punch of that reveal. It's seared into my memory.

Even as she thought this, she knew it was an impossibility. They weren’t him; they weren’t Sebastian—they weren’t the man she loved and would love forever—they were just a pair of old shoes. Even so, parting with them would be an act of self-harm, like pressing a knife to her arm and slicing off a sliver of skin. Something beautiful, something holy, had died. All that remained were the books he read, the clothes he wore, the things he touched. She could still smell him on them, still taste him on the tip of her tongue. Recently, out of morbid curiosity, and in an attempt to understand what she was wrestling with, Mariana had reread all of Freud’s writings about grief and loss. And he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or else you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia—and we call depression. Delicious Cambridge atmosphere, detailed depictions about the surroundings which takes us virtual vacation to this epic, historical place! A deliciously dark, elegant, utterly compulsive read —with a twist that blew my mind. I loved this even more than I loved The Silent Patient and that's saying something!"

Zoe, in fact, was only a quarter Greek. She had her father's fair coloring and his blue eyes—so it didn't particularly show, this quarter Greekness. ....Tell us one more time, is she a quarter or just a third Greek??? where i lost my mind was when mariana is led to the location of the murder weapon by a non-police person, and it doesn't even occur to her to object when they remove it from its hidey-hole. i know she's not a professional with a responsibility to preserve evidence, but oh we just allow people to grab murder weapons now, do we? mariana? COME ON, MARIANA! The story is also interspersed with journal-entry-like chapters written by an unnamed person, who describes his childhood growing up with an abusive father on a farm. He talks about how one part of him is sane and calm and the other part of him is a bloodthirsty killer.

Combining Greek mythology with propulsive suspense, this gripping, twisty tale is the perfect way to start off your summer reading with a bang."As well as the group therapy element Mariana was supposedly heavily involved in. The come-about of the Maidens. Mariana’s relationship with Zoe. The trauma she’s suffered from her husbands death. I’m not even going to mention here all the dumb decisions this woman has made. I don’t have time to do it, and you don’t have time to read it. The ridiculous jumping to conclusions made her seem very unprofessional. Her chase after Professor Fosca felt like a house of cards. Took a lot of effort to construct, yet it was so obviously easy to blow away.

Ten years ago, on the fictional island of Inisrun, a young woman was murdered but nobody was ever charged with the crime. A decade later, two documentary film-makers have arrived to interview residents and try to uncover the truth. Exploring themes of class, wealth, desire and coercive control, O’Neill’s psychological thriller is a meticulously researched and emotionally astute exploration into the far-reaching impact of domestic abuse. The irony that Mariana ended up becoming a group therapist was not lost on her. But paradoxically, this ambivalence about others served her well. In group therapy, the group, not the individual, is the focus of treatment: to be a successful group therapist is—to some extent—to be invisible. However, Mariana is able to overpower Zoe (with help from Fred, a guy who has a crush on Mariana), and Zoe ends up injured and being arrested. Fosca dropped his cigarette onto the path. He ground it into the earth with his foot. "You're determined to dislike me. I don't know why." When Fosca notices Mariana's interest in him, he invites her to dinner. There, he tells Mariana about how the pinecone was a symbol given to each initiate into the cult of Eleusis and about his unhappy childhood on a farm. Mariana also sees his copy of Euripides complete works with on of the quotations on the postcards underlined, making her certain he is the murderer.

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A monster with a knife was among them, unseen, prowling the streets, apparently able to strike and then melt away invisibly into the darkness… His invisibility made him into something more than human, something supernatural: a creature born from myth, a phantom.

Mariana is determined to outwit the Professor, to protect Zoe, but this may be her biggest challenge yet. Plus, the whole story felt just a tad too dramatic to feel genuine. Which is not exactly untypical for dark academia, but there’s good dramatic and bad dramatic. And this one wasn’t exactly great. There’s definitely a flavour of The Secret History to Alex Michaelides’s second novel … The Maidens is a compelling read, and delivers its Hellenic thrills in style.’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH Was this book perfect? No, but how many of them are, honestly? Yes, it will be too slow of a burn for some readers, especially those expecting a Silent Patient 2.0 type of read, but if you're willing to go into this one with an open mind and a fresh palate, and you enjoy the literary side of crime fiction, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the author's versatility in writing. Here we have a limited third person view, told strictly from Mariana's POV, and this is where I think most of my hesitance in giving the book 5 stars stems from. Third POV has a way of keeping the reader at a distance if we can't experience the story from multiple viewpoints, and I think seeing things play out from various character's experiences would have allowed me to get a little closer to the story and connect on a deeper level to the characters, rather than feeling like we were getting a condensed version of the tale shortened for time's sake.

So many thanks to Macmillan Reading Insiders club for providing me this readers’ advance copy in exchange my honest opinions.