This is a wonderful cozy crime novel that maintains the protaganist all the way through to the end without slipping once – as neat as the corners of the bed that the maid makes.

Molly is a maid in The Regency Hotel, a grand place which requires high standards of its staff. This is fine because Molly loves to clean and often cleans to erase difficult social situations that she doesn’t understand. She has to work hard at knowing what a facial expression means but is a whizz at cleaning. She loves her trolley of cleaning goods – stocking it up first thing in the morning, and her uniform which makes her disappear. No one notices the maid.

But people are not always what they seem and without her Gran who has died, Molly is not so great at detecting which people are acting out of kindness and which out of selfishness and this gets her into difficulty after she finds Mr Black dead on his bed when she goes into clean the room.

Slowly, over the course of the book, she finds out who her friends are – in fact that she even has any – and who are not, a painful process when she has been used by them to save their own skins. This is a cozy crime so although she is accused of killing Mr Black it all comes good in the end.

Very enjoyable.