Novel of the week Francesca Carington

368PP, W&N, £14.99, EBOOK £7.99, AUDIO AVAILABLE

There’s definitely a flavour of The Secret History to Alex Michaelides’s second novel (after his bestselling thriller The Silent Patient). It’s set at an elite university, where an even more elite group of students chosen by a charismatic professor are a bit too keen on an ancient Greek cult.

But despite its Tarttian surface, The Maidens is really a straightforward murder-mystery with a juicy setting. Mariana, a group therapist, is mourning the death of her husband. When her niece Zoe, an undergraduate at Cambridge, calls to say her friend Tara has been murdered, Mariana hurries to the city. She’s struck by a group of gorgeous and wealthy students who call themselves the Maidens, picked for extra study by the enigmatic Professor Fosca, who lectures on the cult of Persephone, queen of the underworld. When one of the Maidens turns up dead, Mariana is sure Fosca is behind it. “The college, after all, is just another group – with sickness at its core.”

To solve the case, Mariana must first confront her own demons. A leitmotif here is the idea of dazzling: Zoe says Fosca “dazzles me, I suppose”, and when Mariana sees one of the corpses she remembers a line from The Duchess of Malfi (“Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle”). Being blinded – by beauty, love or horror – is Michaelides’s concern.

Less sophisticated are some of his Greek references: “She was stuck, paralysed – as Demeter had once been, when Hades kidnapped her beloved daughter, Persephone, and took her to the Underworld to be his bride.” Sometimes it works, as in a therapy session with the Maidens, when Mariana applies modern psychology to myth: “at a very young age, Iphigenia mistook abuse for love.” In a spot of deft mythological red-herring work, Michaelides shifts emphasis from one doomed heroine to another. The twist, when it comes, is slightly far-fetched, but The Maidens is a compelling read, and delivers its Hellenic thrills in style.