Mystery/Thriller -- 2 1/2 stars
Edward Fosca, a popular professor at Cambridge University, has a small group of female followers that he calls The Maidens. These young women are being murdered, one by one. Zoe, a current student who knows all the victims, is sure Prof. Fosca is responsible, and asks her aunt and graduate of the University, Mariana Andros, for help to prove it. Edward Fosca, Marianna Andros, The Maidens, Zoe--someone is not telling the truth. ----- I waited impatiently for this novel to be available at my library. I shouldn't have. Simple sentences and short chapters make this story seem to fly, until you get to the climax, and realize that, while you may have been entertained, the story is stuck in exactly the same place it was at the beginning--innuendos are not clues, you don't solve anything without proof. The solution comes inside a massive twist, but one that has no basis in anything that has come before. It's like attending American history lectures for an entire semester only to find that the final is in French. When one major plot point is cavalierly closed in a single sentence of an epilogue, it only adds to the disappointment. The Maidens is slickly entertaining, but empty.
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