Crime mystery set in Cambridge

30th October 2021

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides, crime mystery set in Cambridge.

This is a modern day mystery, with plenty of literary references and a cast of colourfully drawn characters, all set in the world of academia. Cambridge makes an excellent backdrop with its wonderful architecture, bucolic parts and the weird and archaic traditions that govern university life.

Greek tales and myths very much resonate in present day. A woman’s body is found. Mariana, a former student at the university and now a troubled group therapist (who probably shouldn’t be practising), is convinced that Greek tragedy professor, Edward Fosca, is a murderer – he is an unassailable academic whose influence reaches far and wide. Mariana can’t take her eye off the members of a secret society called The Maidens who seem to idolise him. When another body is found, her fixation goes into overdrive and I found myself palming my forehead!

This novel is quite the gothic psychodrama, with an inventive combination of threads. It is very readable but sometimes gets a little archly derailed as it builds to its conclusion.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

================================================================================

I was invited to a Zoom interview with Alex Michaelides and his editor Emad Akhtar by the publisher (Orion) and it was an interesting and revealing session. As an author, he is thoughtful and incisive about what he wants to achieve with his writing and I came away with some good insights, before I had even read the novel.

He said he was quite stuck on how to conclude the novel and it was author Sophie Hannah who steered him to what he hopes to be a satisfying ending. He clearly has a deep interest in the psychological processes that inform human behaviour and in fact he studied psychotherapy for 3 years and then became a little disillusioned by the specific practices of those who ran the group therapy sessions.

“Greek Tragedies stand up to psychodynamic theory” is so pertinent when you consider the internecine dramas and the motives for actions. He was brought up on Aphrodite’s Island – Cyprus – and that culture has followed him into his creativity.

Location is important! He said that Ruth Rendell would walk in the footsteps of his character and he emulated her by walking around Cambridge in the footsteps of Mariana, who is in heartbreak and mourning. As he followed his character, he found he became more lonely, as he reflected upon Mariana’s position and as he himself experienced fully the loss of his time in the city (he studied at Trinity).

Cambridge is integral, he feels, to the plot but the film, with Renee Zellweger, will be set in California, and he feels it will take so much away from the ethos of the novel by changing the setting so fundamentally – he seemed quite sad about this.

Join Team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts