Synopsis -
Mariana, a group therapist, is still grieving her beloved husband’s death. But when her niece’s close friend is murdered in Cambridge, she rushes to the college for her moral support. Soon, she gets entangled in the murder investigation & strongly suspects Edward Fosca, the highly popular Professor who teaches Greek tragedy at the University. In her quest to prove his guilt, she is in for some incredible discoveries.

Review -

Michaelides certainly knows how to create an intriguing ambience around an academic setting like the prestigious Cambridge University. His descriptions & atmospheric presentation were top notch indeed. But it took me sometime to warm up to the references to Greek mythology & Tennyson’s poems. Initially I felt they were all over the place.

The first half of the book lacked a graceful flow. My attempts to connect with Mariana were futile. I know that her past was important to the plot, but it was brought so abruptly each time & her misery was a never ending spiral. She was just weak, her thoughts never clear & is unsure of almost everything! Her character was a major let down.

I did enjoy the psychological aspects of the book. The author’s understanding of human nature, the effects of childhood on human behaviour & group therapy did play out well.

But it was the murder mystery aspect of it, that failed. I waited to feel the thrill or get the kick from the jaw drop, but they never happened. Also, some of the characters were just simply unnecessary.

It started getting too unrealistic towards the end. Too much was left for the reader’s interpretation. For someone with zero knowledge about ancient Greek history, it was frustrating to get a grasp.

The ending didn’t get me excited either. The big reveal was so disappointing, with its lacklustre twist & did not justify the construction of the plot.

Overall, I would say pick it up if you are a fan of murder mysteries in an academic setting, with a liking for Greek mythology.

Thanks NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for the ARC.

Atmospheric, Compelling …..
Accomplished literary suspense, with a slow burn starting point but soon picking up pace to become addictive and gripping with a well drawn, credible cast of characters and a complex, clever plot packed with atmosphere and a solid sense of place. A thoroughly compelling read.

I enjoyed the author’s debut, The Silent Patient, so I was really excited for The Maidens! Set at Cambridge University, the location is like another character, looming in the background. I enjoyed the amount of detail included, from the dorm rooms to the architecture of the campus. Discussions on Greek tragedies and literature provided a unique angle to the story and added to the moody ambience.

I wish the author had focused on these elements because I found the murder mystery to be weak. The investigation is unrealistic; the police don’t follow up on clues and Mariana interfered without any difficulties. I didn’t find the plot twist to be effective because it relies on information the reader does not have. I also didn’t believe the villain’s motive. The characterisations were superficial and unconvincing, like men who stalked Mariana yet one of them is cast as her love interest. But I’m mostly disappointed at the lack of agency for the women. I wanted to know about The Maidens, who they are, and what drew them to the secret society, yet they barely featured. The book could have dived into the themes of female friendships, power imbalance, abuse, and sexual grooming. But it barely scratched the surface.

For The Maidens, I say stay for the dark academia vibes but temper your expectations on the murder mystery.

I was so excited when I got this book from Netgalley because I loved The Silent Patient so much. So I think I might have expected too much from this one because it really did feel like a let down. There wasn't anything inherently wrong with the book or the writing, it just didn't grab my attention and felt a bit flat. The book had short chapters though which made it very easy to read and I imagine if you could get into it then you'd be able to read it really quickly.

I liked the references to Greek mythology and how important these became to the story. I also really liked the references back to The Silent Patient but it's not necessary to have read it for this one to make sense. However, I thought the main character was really one dimensional and actually quite boring. I didn't find her very likeable at all really.

For me the book was a little bit predictable and I did see the twist coming. This kind of made the last few chapters a bit disappointing and not as satisfying as I was expecting. I didn't guess the reasoning behind the murders but I also didn't think it fit with the story as well as it could have done.

There were some little plot points that didn't quite tie up and I'm still questioning whether they were really necessary or just added to make things a bit more complicated. These plot points couldn't have been tied to the murders really so I don't fully understand why they were needed.

Overall, I didn't think it was a huge success but I'd still probably read the next book that Michaelides writes.

There's always a huge amount of anticipation on the shoulders of a writer when their début novel is a worldwide bestseller. Like many, I've eagerly anticipated waiting for The Maidens and for me, this is a very worthy successor to The Silent Patient.

Mariana Andros is a dedicated group therapist and widow. When her Cambridge student niece Zoe, calls and tells her, her friend is missing, Mariana's instinct is to go to her. Arriving at St. Christopher's College she consoles Zoe after Tara's body is discovered but something isn't right. In addition to helping find the murdered the college backdrop reawakens Mariana's memories of her beloved husband Sebastian; from the time they spent together as students at the college. When she meets the charismatic professor, Edward Fosca, she is sure he is guilty of murder as the evidence stacks up against him. Only, why would he kill his students?

The beginning was slow however, the pace and my interest soon picked up as the narrative settles into a steady rhythm. Thanks to the short chapters it's easy to digest the clues; mostly red herrings as they crop up. Intertwined are references to Greek Tragedies and Alfred Tennyson to add weight to the exposed evidence. The author's writing is clear and succinct, again making it easy for the reader to keep abreast of the proceedings. Therefore, I did manage to pick up on a clue, silently patting myself on the back before getting blind-sided with the reveal of the killer's identity.

With the cameo appearance of two characters from The Silent Patient, I do wonder if a third novel by the author may tie these two narratives together… if so, I'll be the first in the clue to read it!

***arc received courtesy of Orion Publishing via NetGalley***

I had great expectations for The Maidens, after absolutely loving the author's debut, and although this was in no means awful, it didn't quite capture me the way his previous book did. It had the twists, drama and anticipation that I love, but for me I would classify this a fantasy-thriller which unfortunately is just not for me.

This will appeal to huge audience, and I did enjoy it, it was good to try something different, and broaden my reading horizons, so please do not be out of by this review. If you have read this, or due to soon, get in touch, and let's chat! I am intrigued to know what other readers thought of this.

I wasn’t a massive fan of the first book by this author, the story didn’t work for me but I did like their writing style and was definitely interested in future work. When I heard the premise for this I was very excited. Right up my street.

I spent about 75% of this convinced I knew how this was going to play out and I was wrong. Which is a great feeling in a thriller .

This is one of my favourite thrillers of the year so far, great setting, good dynamic characters and a twist I didn’t see coming. All round one I’d recommend.

The Maidens is a psychological thriller set in a fictitious Cambridge University college. Psychologist Mariana goes back to her alma mater to comfort her niece after the murder of her student friend, and try to solve the crime.

Sadly, I found the novel pretty unconvincing in both plot and characterisation. All the male characters were creepy and the female characters seemed to find that creepiness normal and/or charming. The surprise twist ending did not make sense to me and altogether I found the book unsatisfying.

Three stars however for pace and ease of reading.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

It was inevitable that whatever Alex Michaelides wrote after The Silent Patient would be greeted with feverish expectation and overblown hype. Such is the fate of a second novel when the debut has been so exquisite. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, The Maidens struggles to reach the dizzy heights of its predecessor.

The premise is intriguing: tragic young widow and psychotherapist Mariana gets drawn into a serial murder investigation at Cambridge University, where the first victim is a close friend of her niece Zoe.

The narrative is steeped in references to Greek myth and tragedy; the prime suspect — from Mariana’s perspective, at least — the charismatic but creepy Edward Fosca, the university’s highly regarded professor of Greek tragedy. The victims are all members of Fosca’s The Maidens, a fawning group of beautiful, smart, privileged young women, in thrall to their professor.

Like The Silent Patient, this is a tantalizing, slow burning psychological thriller. Perhaps a little too slow in the beginning. What keeps you immersed, though, is Michaelides’ breathtakingly evocative prose. The language is beautiful; the conjured images so vivid as to be almost tangible. He writes for his words to be savored, and so they should be.

Michaelides’ style is all about atmosphere. And this is dripping with it; at times suffocatingly so. The tension builds relentlessly to what you sense will be an explosive finale. You may, like me, be disappointed.

Granted, the twist is cleverly disguised. But it’s also terribly far fetched. A case of Michaelides perhaps trying too hard to replicate the shocking twist from The Silent Patient and falling victim to his own good intentions.

To summarize: glorious prose, exquisite sense of place. Shame about the plot and the characters.

Thank you, NetGalley for a chance to read and review this!

We've all heard of the silent patient, even if we haven't read it, but everyone knows that for me the real sell was the nod to greek mythology coupled with dark academia. Believe me when I wanted to love this book, but it was the last 20% that made me want to run away and pretend I had never seen it before.

I'm not going to get into details regarding the plot, but I will say that Michaelides spent too much time on Marian's grief, and far too little on the ending! The first 20% of the book was so boring that I was about to mark it DNF, and then things really did pick up in a good way. But then the end with Fred and Zoe and Sebastian was messed up in an entirely different way. How could Mariana not see what happened in her own home? We're praying to Demeter and Persephone and find the answer right away?.Mariana bugged me because why are you trying to investigate a murder (lowkey TSTL tbh)? Her patient is stalking her and she hasn't really reported it but when he's arrested feels guilty very briefly and we're done with things?

WOW!! What an ending! I thought I had it figured out and not the obvious conclusion that was dished up as a distraction, but boy did I get it wrong!
This is all a sleight of hand; an illusion interwoven with Greek mythology that made for fascinating reading.
I've always been fascinated by Greek mythology and the references to Eleusis and her daughter Persephone was so interesting. Especially how it linked with the storyline and with the theme of death. (Persephone was the queen of the Underworld and called the "Bringer of Death"

The story is about Mariana. It is a year since her husband died. He was her everything; the air that she breathed and she is still struggling with the loss. Then she gets a phone call from her niece Zoe and this is how the nightmare starts.

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear" C.S. Lewis

A brilliant read that I can highly recommend!

Thank you to NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Wow!!! That is how I sum this book up in a word. I have finished it in a day as I was so caught up in everything that goes on and I wanted to know "who dunnit".

Mariana is a group therapist who is in mourning for the husband who died a year previously. When her niece, Zoe calls her in desperation, she drops everything to be by her side. The story twists and turns as other murders occur and Mariana is determined she knows who it is but the police aren't listening to her.

I absolutely loved reading this book and was kept guessing throughout - I thought I had the murderer pegged early on - how wrong was I? There is enough detail to the scene that you imagine yourself within the old walls of a Cambridge University building and the characters within the novel are fit for purpose. Described in enough detail that I even had my own opinion on several of them and the way they behaved.

I was pleasantly surprised by this second book by Michaelides as I was not a big fan of his first, The Silent Patient. This book surpasses it in all areas.

Many thanks to the author and Netgalley for an advanced read copy.

I loved The Silent Patient so I was eager to read this, the next novel by Alex Michaelides, and the cover and premise drew me in further as I love Greek mythology and have thoroughly enjoyed the recent outpouring of novels based on this- although of course The Maidens is set in modern day Cambridge University! A brilliant twist and turning epic story, focusing on a Greek tragedy professor, Edward- highly admired and revered at the university but therapist Mariana isn’t so sure about him. Brilliant characters, great twists, everything I expected!

This is that rare beast, an erudite crime novel. Greek drama, Greek legend and even chunks of the Greek language lift this brilliant novel into the realms of fine literature. The basic premise is a series of crimes in Cambridge and the level of writing reflects that gilded place of learning. Utterly engrossing from start to finish.

I really loved The Silent Patient when I read it a while ago. So much so that I was itching to get my hands on this book. Eager and a little wary as I worried it wouldn't live up to my high expectations. Well, to say I wasn't disappointed would be an understatement. I blooming loved it. It had me running around chasing my tail, every which way as I tried desperately to second guess what in heck was going on.
We meet Mariana not too long after the death of her husband. The love of her life. She is a therapist specialising in group therapy and, apart from work, doesn't really have much else in her life. Apart from her niece, Zoe, who she is really close to after the death of her parents. Zoe calls her in a panic from her university room in Cambridge where she is a student. There's been a body found and her best friend Tara is missing. She has put two and two together and is devastated. Mariana does what anyone would do, she clears her calendar, packs a bag and rushes off to Cambridge, her old university too as it happens so she is very familiar with how things work.
Long story short, Mariana's fingers start to point to one of Zoe's professors as a very credible suspect. One Edward Fosca. She is convinced he is behind the murder, especially when another of his "followers" is also killed soon after Mariana arrives. But proving it is a bit more tricky... as Mariana soon discovers.
For full disclosure I do have a few niggles about this book. But nothing too major to put me over the edge and all mostly forgivable. I could expand here but I fear spoilers so I won't. Suffice to say there were a few actions that were a bit dubious but, never having been in that position myself, who am I really to judge. Nothing I read jarred me out of the story which I pretty much read straight through in only a couple of sittings. If you have read The Silent Patient you will recognise the nod the author pays it in this book but if you haven't it won't matter. Just a little something from the author to his faithful readers; nice touch.
Mariana wasn't the strongest lead in the world but, after a while, I did start to get to gel with her. I don't think we'll ever be friends and I also did find her a bit limiting in the old common sense, but I guess you get that with highly intelligent people - they often lack street smarts. The rest of the cast were well drawn and all acted their parts well. No mean feat given the secrets, lies and duplicity flying around and about.
Pacing was good throughout and the ending, when the truth finally all came out, was both shocking and satisfying.
All in all, a good solid read that has now cemented the author on my watch list. Roll on next time. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

The Maidens is a mixture of psychological suspense, mystery and gothic thriller from award-winning crime writer Alex Michaelides connecting dark secrets behind the old walls of Cambridge University with the deep, bleak abysses of a family in crisis. At thirty-six years old, London psychotherapist Mariana Andros is desperately trying to recover from the loss of her beloved husband Sebastian, the great love of her life, who drowned during a vacation on a Greek island. She is in the middle of providing group therapy to some of her patients, but when her niece Zoe, her only remaining family, calls her from Cambridge to tell her that Tara Hampton, her best friend, has been brutally murdered near the student residence, she decides to come to her aid. There she meets Fosca, a charismatic professor of Classical Philology. The professor maintains a study group with a very select number of female disciples, all beautiful and from elite families, of which Tara was a part; they are known colloquially as the Maidens. In the dead young woman's bedroom, Mariana finds a postcard Tara had received just before her death with some verses in classical Greek, from several Eleusinian cults and depicting carved Greek statues, that demand a sacrifice. This card is, perhaps coincidentally, very much in line with what Professor Fosca teaches.

Soon the corpses of other Maidens will appear on campus with their eyes gouged out and a pineapple in their hand, and Mariana will not only have to face the resolution of these crimes but also the ghosts of her own past. This is a riveting, compulsive and endlessly twisty thriller, with a plot ripe with an abundance of twists, turns and crafty misdirection with Michaelides weaving a brilliant, scintillating, pitch-perfect tale. It's very different to The Silent Patient and includes many references to Greek culture, a nod to the author’s heritage, and there is a really unsettling foreboding atmosphere right from the beginning that only the deftest of writers can evoke. Cleverly plotted, breathlessly told, the author pulls out all the stops of intelligent psychological tension, intense drama and top-notch action. Admittedly, it opens at a slow-burn to initially introduce the cast of characters but the suspense begins to simmer and then sizzle as the bodies begin to pile up. The gothic atmosphere is simply delicious and with a masterful combination of palpable tension, erudition and crime, Michaelides’ second novel is an addictive one. With a potent mix of Greek myth, a series of ritualistic killings and at the centre of it all, one of the world’s most prestigious universities, this is an eerie, creepy yet completely engrossing thriller.

I think this is one those book so hyped that you cannot help thinking that it must be the sort of story that will keep turning pages as a maniac and loving every moment of it.
The books I had in mind when I started this book were "Gaudy Night" and "Magpie Lane". Two books set in the university world, Gaudy Night written by Dorothy Sayers and the author says this is a homage to the Queens of Golden Age.
Let's say that Gaudy Night is a psychological thriller ante-litteram, a book set in Oxford and game of mind games.
These were my expectations as I didn't read The Silent Patient.
It's good thriller, fast paced and it kept me reading even if I hated all the characters. Sometimes I would have kicked Mariana or any other character.
I must admit that an author should be talented to keep you reading if you are hating the characters.
The plot flows, there are some plot hole ihmo but I read there's going to be a third book and maybe some of my questions will be solved.
It's entertaining, i liked the mythological theme but somehow it missed the WOW factor I expected given the hype and what I read about the Silent Patient.
I recommend it because I think that the positive aspects are more than the negative.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I can’t even describe how much I enjoyed this book! I did liked Alex Michaelides’ debut book, The Silent Patient, but with this one, I think he went above and beyond. You could feel the change in confidence in writing and felt like he tried to please more the readers with this book. I loved the setting of the story. I loved the references in Greek mythology. The characters, for me, couldn’t be presented better and the plot was so satisfying! The twist at the end wasn’t predictable and made it even more enjoyable. This read had a bit of ‘old school’ mystery vibes that I would like to see more in the genre. Please do read guys!

I absolutely loved ‘The Silent Patient’ by Alex Michaelides, so I was really excited to read his new book ‘The Maidens’. This book embeds Greek mythology into the story and I really enjoyed that element of it. I love the twists that Alex Michaelides puts into his books and this read was no exception. I loved following along with Mariana as she tried to piece this mystery together and the crossover with The Silent Patient was so well done. All in all this was a great book that slowly unpacked a mystery that you spent every page trying to solve and just when you think you have solved it, there are more twists and turns. I loved this read and feel that if you enjoyed ‘The Silent Patient’ you will also love this book.
Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek Tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike- particularly by the members of a secret society of female student known as The Maidens. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana’s niece Zoe, is found murdered in Cambridge. Mariana, who was once herself a student at the university, quickly suspects that behind the idyllic beauty of the spires and turrets, and beneath the traditions, lies something sinister.
Thank you NetGalley for my review copy.

Following up a runaway success like The Silent Patient is no small task , and as a huge fan of that book I was eager to get my hands on an advance copy of the latest release from Alex Michaelides, The Maidens.
The setting, Cambridge University, and the premise, a series of young women killed in a ritualistic manner , as well as my knowledge of the author's skill meant that I had high hopes for this book.
First let me say that this is a very different book from its predecessor . It ties in a lot of Greek Myth and gives the reader lots of puzzle pieces to try to piece together before the killer is revealed. I love a book with a psychologist as the main character, and here we have Mariana, widowed a year ago who is drawn into the mystery when her niece Zoe's friend is one of the murder victims. When a second body is found, it seems like the killer is targeting a specific group of students, christened The Maidens by their charming or creepy (depending on your perspective) professor Edward Fosca. Both Mariana and Zoe are convinced that he is guilty, but the police are less convinced, especially since he has an alabi for each of the crimes. It soon becomes a cat and mouse game as Mariana is determined to prove his guilt before another young woman dies.
The book definitely moves at a slower pace but I did appreciate how well the setting was recreated on the page. I enjoyed seeing the story unfold , but thought the reveal at the end was a little weak.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the Publisher, all opinions are my own.