A Cambridge Cult, a Dead Poet, and One Ridiculous Twist

Cambridge, Cults, and a Very Dead Classicist

Here’s the setup, and I’ll admit it’s a good one. Mariana Andros is a group therapist in London, still raw from her husband’s death, when her niece Zoe calls from Cambridge in a panic: a fellow student has been murdered. Mariana goes running, the way aunts in thrillers do, and finds herself back on the campus where she met her late husband years ago, wandering those old stone courtyards that Michaelides clearly adores writing about.

The dead girl was one of “the Maidens,” an exclusive, whispered-about clique of beautiful female students who orbit a charismatic classics professor named Edward Fosca. Fosca teaches Greek tragedy, quotes Euripides at dinner parties, and radiates the kind of magnetic menace that makes every student a little in love with him and every reader immediately suspicious of him. Mariana becomes convinced he’s a killer. The book spends its middle stretch letting her chase that theory through libraries, punts on the river, and increasingly reckless confrontations, while more Maidens turn up dead.

I won’t spoil where it lands, but I’ll say this: Michaelides is playing the same game he played in The Silent Patient, planting a narrator whose grief has made her an unreliable investigator of her own instincts. When it worked in that book, it was devastating. Here it works about two thirds as well, and I think I know why.

Why the Atmosphere Is a Five and the Plot Is a Three

Look, the setting alone almost carries this book. Michaelides went to Cambridge and it shows in every sentence about mist over the Cam, gargoyles, secret societies, and dons who talk exclusively in aphorisms. If you are the kind of reader who wants to feel like you’re eating scones in a library that smells like old paper and repressed feelings, this book delivers that in spades. The Greek tragedy motif, the idea that Mariana is essentially watching a modern Bacchae unfold among these students, is a genuinely smart structural choice, and there were passages where I underlined things just because the mood was so thick I wanted to bottle it.

Here’s the thing though. The mystery itself has a problem that I can’t fully explain without spoiling it, so I’ll be vague: the solution depends on a piece of information being withheld from the reader in a way that feels less like a clever misdirect and more like the rules changed at the last minute. I remember actively arguing with the book in my head around the final fifty pages, flipping back to see if I’d missed a clue, and realizing no, I hadn’t missed it, it just wasn’t fully there to find. That’s the difference between a twist that rewards a re-read and a twist that just startles you once and evaporates.

Mariana herself is also a tougher narrator to love than Michaelides seems to think. She makes genuinely bad decisions for someone who is supposedly an expert in reading people’s psychology, and I found myself less moved by her grief than mildly frustrated by her judgment. Zoe, the niece, barely gets to be a person instead of a plot device. Fosca is the best-drawn character in the book by a mile, all seductive menace and classical allusion, and honestly I wanted more of him and less of everyone standing around reacting to him.

My tangent: I went in expecting this to be scarier than it was. Everyone talks about “the Maidens” like they’re a horror-cult, and mostly they’re just pretty, sad students who don’t get individual personalities. I kept waiting for one of them to become a real character before she became a body, and that never quite happened.

So Did I Like It

Yes, mostly, while I was reading it. My complaints are the kind that arrive after you close the book and start thinking, rather than the kind that stop you from turning pages. I tore through it in a day. I just don’t think it survives the drive home from the plot the way The Silent Patient did. I keep wondering if I’m being too hard on it because the first book set the bar impossibly high, or if the twist genuinely doesn’t hold up. I think it’s some of both, honestly.

You can grab a copy here if you want to argue with me about the ending: The Maidens on Amazon.

Every good thriller convinces you the monster is obvious right up until it shows you your own reflection instead.

About Alex Michaelides

Michaelides is a Cyprus-born, Cambridge-educated screenwriter who spent years in Hollywood before The Silent Patient turned him into a publishing phenomenon almost overnight. He studied English literature at Cambridge and psychotherapy at a London university, and both show up constantly in his fiction, the campus gothic instinct and the therapist’s fascination with what people hide from themselves. He wrote for film for over a decade before any of his novels sold, which maybe explains why his books read so cinematically, all mood lighting and reveal shots, sometimes at the expense of the quieter work fiction can do that film can’t.

If This Made You Want More Dark Academia, Read These Next

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt, the book every dark academia novel is quietly trying to be, and the one that does the “beautiful terrible students” thing with far more psychological depth
• The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, his debut, and honestly the better constructed of the two if you haven’t read it yet
• If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, Shakespeare instead of Greek tragedy, same claustrophobic ensemble-of-beautiful-doomed-students energy
• Bunny by Mona Awad, if you want the cult-of-pretty-girls idea pushed into something stranger and funnier

For your book club

1. Did you suspect the actual killer, or did the book successfully misdirect you? At what point, if any, did your theory change?
2. Mariana keeps returning to Cambridge even as things get more dangerous. Is that grief, obsession, or something else?
3. Is Edward Fosca a compelling villain because of what he does, or because of what he represents about charisma and power in academic spaces?
4. The novel leans hard on Greek tragedy as a structural mirror. Did that deepen the story for you, or did it feel decorative?
5. Compare this to The Silent Patient. Which twist do you think is more earned, and why?