The book gets off to a slow start, front-loaded with backstories and a Cambridge travelogue, but then picks up the pace and piles up the bodies. Suspicious characters seem to be around every ivy-covered corner of the campus, though-an audacious young man Mariana meets on the train, one of her patients who has turned stalker, a porter at one of the college’s venerable houses, even the surly police inspector. She zeroes in on Edward Fosca, a handsome, charismatic classics professor who has a cultlike following of beautiful female students (which included Tara) called the Maidens, a reference to the cult of Eleusis in ancient Greece, whose followers worshipped Demeter and Persephone. Mariana heads for Cambridge and, when the police arrest someone she thinks is innocent, starts her own investigation. Zoe has terrible news: Her close friend Tara has been murdered, savagely stabbed and dumped in a wood.

Zoe is now studying at Cambridge, where Mariana and Sebastian met and courted. She’s galvanized out of her fog by a call from her niece, Zoe, who was raised by Mariana and Sebastian after her parents died. At 36, she’s a widow, reeling from the drowning a year before of her beloved husband, Sebastian.

This book’s protagonist is Mariana, who has a busy practice in London specializing in group therapy. The author’s second novel features a psychotherapist as its main character, as did his 2019 debut, The Silent Patient (whose main character makes an appearance here). A blend of psychological mystery and gothic thriller puts a psychotherapist in pursuit of a serial killer on the campus of Cambridge University.

The maidens alex michaelides