The Maidens unapologetically takes the tone of a thriller. Fosca has a loyal student clique of “maidens,” an exclusive study group whose parties, we are told (in low, conspiratorial tones), are pretty wild. He is the kind of teacher whose lectures students line up to watch. And so it is fitting that at the center of the mystery around Tara’s untimely demise is Professor Edward Fosca, a dazzling American expatriate and classics professor. The murder, Mariana learns, is bound up with Greek tragedy and myth. (At one point, Mariana comes upon a statue of an angel and thinks it looks like Sebastian, which is really not to give the reader any credit at all.) Sebastian is painfully present to her in Cambridge, and at times he appears in the guise of a guardian angel, pressing Mariana on and giving her strength. Mariana, whose intuitions are predictably dismissed by the inspector handling the case, decides to remain in Cambridge and get to the bottom of things herself. What follows is a taut and diligently plotted detective story.

Occasional citations from Tennyson, Aristotle and others intensify the carefully built sense of tension in Alex Michaelides's new book.

And so Mariana must return, with some trepidation, to the place where she and Sebastian met and fell hopelessly in love.

The body of Tara, a friend of Zoe’s at the University of Cambridge, is found slashed to ribbons in the woods. In the middle of her own grief and crisis, she also has others to think about: her clients, including the highly volatile Henry, and her orphaned niece, Zoe. Despite her best efforts, she cannot bring herself to discard his possessions. Her impossibly perfect partner, Sebastian, has drowned off the coast of Naxos, and he and his death occupy almost all of her thoughts. Of course, as one character points out, a psychotherapist is, etymologically speaking, a “healer of souls,” and it is Mariana’s soul that is in need of repair first of all.

Alex michaelides the maidens