The Maid's Diary: A Novel

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Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” White successfully uses various unreliable narrators along with past/present timelines to create a stellar thriller. I consider myself to be an amateur sleuth and generally have a solid idea of how the story will play out. Not on this one. So many diabolical characters!!

With the exception of Daisy’s social media posts which were a bore-since this has been so overused in recent books-the first half was VERY suspenseful. Imagine Kit’s surprise when she discovers, quite by chance, that her newest client turns out to be none other than the bane of her youth, the popular Jon Rittenberg, who went on from High School to become an Olympic Gold Medalist. He is now married to Daisy Rittenberg (née Wentworth) the daughter of wealthy and influential Labden and Annabelle Wentworth, and is next in line for a top promotion in the resort empire founded by his father-in-law. I especially enjoyed the author's vivid and poignant characterizations of unlikeable protagonists as well as the book's riveting and compelling police procedurals.

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Mal (Mallory) Van Alst is the homicide cop who is called to the scene at the luxury waterfront home known as the Glass House. It’s a bloody one. Mal needs to rely on her, what most likely is, an unreliable witness. All she has is one bloody crime scene. Mal doesn’t know how much of the information she gleans from the elderly woman is accurate. Mal tells the story in real time. Kathryn Croft’s newest psychological thriller, The Suspect, follows one woman’s determination to uncover the truth of her mother’s murder. I’ve been deliberately vague because to do otherwise would reveal surprises best discovered for yourself.

Anyways, along this line, let me tell you what really rubbed me the wrong way. SPOILER ALERT... SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM As Mal begins to uncover the secret that has sent the lives of everyone involved on a devious and inescapable collision course, she realizes that nothing is quite as it seems.Kit Darling is a thirty four year old maid with a passion for amateur theater and SNOOPING. She is going to share the “dirt” she finds while cleaning, with you, dear reader, through the words in her diary-because she is missing. When Jess was two years old, her mother Lori was murdered while they were in the park. Jess has no memory of who killed her mother. The police had a suspect, Nathan French, but there was not enough evidence to convict him. Now twenty-eight years later, Nathan approaches Jess in the street and tells her that he did not kill her mother and has proof of who did. Nathan wants to meet up again with Jess and give her the proof, but before they can meet again, Nathan is murdered. Jess does not know what to believe now. Could the man that she thought killed her mother really be innocent? When Jess searches for answers, she starts to uncover information that changes everything she thought she knew, and she realizes that the person that murdered her mother is closer to home than she imagined.