Story for the Week
If my two main obsessions in life are reading and The Sims, I see nothing wrong with back-to-back blog posts about reading and The Sims. 🤭
While last week’s post focused on the new expansion pack “Royalty & Legacy” (The Sims 4 Complete with Royal Scandals), this one focuses on the hired help. The fabulously wealthy can afford a live-in butler and a maid and a ranch hand and all the things that make it easier for your Sims to do the fun things you want them to do. Because in the Sim world, just making breakfast and eating takes a crap ton of game time. Add kids and pets to the mix and you can forget letting your Sims have any kind of fun.
Word of warning…prepare yourself. I do talk about my Sims like they’re real people because there can be soap-opera levels of drama. I’m not alone though. You can find a number of Facebook groups devoted to The Sims. And the number of times I come across a post where people comment that they have to remember to check the name of the group before they respond….😉 Well, let’s just say there have been times I prepare to go all keyboard warrior on someone and then realize they aren’t talking about real live kids. 🤷♀️
So let’s talk about hired help in The Sims. The original iteration of the maid and the butler in The Sims were non-player characters (NPC) hired by the day. In The Sims 4, they are still NPCs, but the maid can be scheduled to come every day, and the butler lives with your family.
The butler requires an assigned bed, and you can’t control them like you do the other Sims. You can ask them for help and make them responsible for specific tasks. But left on their own, they will help with childcare, cooking, cleaning, gardening, and household repairs. You can praise them or criticize them. If they really avoid their butler responsibilities, you can fire them and hire someone new.
You can also hire a ranch hand if you have the pack for that and a nanny to help with kids. Honestly, one of the first things I do is hire a maid for every household. Once there are kids in the picture, I have always hired a nanny every 12 hours. Without one, you risk having the kid taken away by social services (not that I would know anything about that from personal experience 🫣). I did discover recently that the nanny will stay indefinitely if the adult leaves the lot while the nanny is there. That was a game changer, and it became a necessity with the family I’m currently playing.
I go through phases where I’ll create a family and use a money cheat (because of course there’s a money cheat) to move them into a spectacular new property. Other times, I’ll start small. A house just big enough for one person, limited furnishings, let them get a job, do odd jobs on their days off…a lot like real life. I used this start-small method with Leah, a fairy who started out her career as a camp counselor and eventually reached the top of her career path as the head park ranger.
Leah met another Sim, fell in love, got married, and had a baby. When Leah ended up expecting again, this time with triplets, I wasn’t too phased. It had been a while since I played the game with toddlers in the family, and I was expecting the three days as a baby and about a week as toddlers before they aged up to children and could fend for themselves a bit. Boy, was I wrong. With one of the new game packs, you could select the life span on your Sims, and apparently, I had selected “long.” And suddenly the newborn to toddler life span increased to about 50 game days. 😯
Luckily, Leah earns good money as the head park ranger, so I added a room to their house and hired a butler. I had her husband quit his job so he could help the butler with the kids as well. I also started calling the nanny every 12 hours. Then one day while I was looking at the babies upstairs with the butler and the nanny, Leah and her husband started brawling in the kitchen downstairs and ended up hating each other. When one of her aspirations became to get a divorce, I almost didn’t have a choice. She instantly became a single mother of four infants. Talk about your family drama!🤦♀️
I decided that Leah needed a roommate. Enter Anissa…who I really set up as a roommate just to help with the babies. 🤭 I put Anissa on the professional athlete career track. One day while Anissa was at work, Leah left for work, and I received the most amazing notification. A hired nanny will stay when all of the adults leave the lot until someone dismisses them. So I had a butler and a nanny!
It was still a ton of work, and I couldn’t wait to age the toddlers up to children, but having a live-in butler and pretty much a live-in nanny (who did not need an assigned bed like the butler) made a huge difference in the game. Worst case, I could have just gone to play another family for a while and let them age up while I was playing another lot, but I wanted to see this family through since I had never experienced multiples in The Sims before. It was also my first time having toddlers learning all the new skills that are a part of the game.
Leah still works as the head park ranger, and Anissa reached the Hall of Fame athlete level. They’ve taken on two businesses…a gym (for obvious reasons) and a luxury rental property. All four of the children are currently attending college. Keeping on top of school work with the “Discover University” pack is hard unless your Sim takes one class at a time. So I moved all four of them to their own lot, I enroll them each in as many classes as possible, and then I go back to Leah’s lot until the semester is over.
I did have the boys hire a maid, but they don’t get a butler yet. They may come from a wealthy family, but they’re young. I don’t want it to go to their heads. 🤣
The butlers in The Sims could never take on the role of Baxter in the book reviewed below. Even though they’re all fictional, all of the butlers in The Sims are elders. In fact, Leah and Anissa are on their second butler because the first one died. There’s no way they would be running around the French Riviera solving a murder.
There is a detective career in The Sims though. Maybe I can create my own Baxter and start a whole new family. 🤔
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐½
3.5 Stars for The Butler by Clare Mackintosh
201 pages
Publisher: Podium Entertainment | Podium Publishing
Publication Date: June 16, 2026
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Podium Entertainment | Podium Publishing.
Publisher’s Description
The South of France is stunning, though not without its imperfections, from pickpockets to burglars to the occasional cold-blooded killer. But in his twenty-five years of service, Baxter—with a spotless reputation as a polished, well-mannered butler—has never run into any issues catering to the ultrawealthy. Until now.
Baxter’s latest assignment is at Villa Sérénité, where Alec Prescott is hosting a colorful cast of characters, including his ex-wife, his much younger lady friend, and some Hollywood hotshots, after the Cannes Film Festival. But it doesn’t take long for a week of sun, wine, and a family birthday celebration to devolve into bickering and backstabbing. And soon, secrets aren’t the only thing floating to the surface…
When one of the guests is found dead in the villa’s glittering pool, the unflappable Baxter must assist the gendarmes in determining who’s responsible. With some standing to gain and others motivated to take it away, fingers are pointed in all directions. A good butler is expected to see everything and say nothing—but what if he too becomes a target?
************
Main Characters:
- Baxter – lives in London, a professional butler who left his last employer after a scandal, currently employed by an agency run by a Russian named Anya Kovács
- Miriam and Thierry – late 30s, a French couple Baxter has worked with in the past, he hired them for his current assignment, Miriam is a housekeeper, Thierry is a chef with a penchant for drinking and gambling
- Red – a pickpocket Baxter keeps crossing paths with in town, he thinks she is no older than 20
- Alec Prescott – 50s, a wealthy investor in films who rented out Villa Sérénité for the Cannes Film Festival as well as to celebrate his son Carter’s 21st birthday
- Kaitlyn Hargreaves – 25 years old, Alec’s girlfriend, claims to be “in beauty” and works with mostly brows and lashes
- Sylvie Calloway – Alec’s ex-wife, Carter’s mom, joining the family at Villa Sérénité for Carter’s birthday celebration
- Carter Prescott – turning 21, son of Alec and Sylvie, trying to found a tech company and get a medical app off the ground
- Jade Thorne – 25 years old, Carter’s new girlfriend, would like to be an actress, has a law degree and currently working on a year-long internship
- Francesca Huxley – a well-known actress, performed in a dozen or so favorite dramas, married to Damian, Carter’s godmother
- Damian Huxley – a movie producer, married to Francesca, Carter’s godfather, trying to convince Alec to invest in his upcoming movie
Clare Mackintosh’s upcoming release of The Butler is clearly the first in what I hope will be a robust series of cozy mysteries. Think Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher, Quincy M.E.’s Quincy, The Mentalist’s Patrick Jane…all characters who solve mysteries but aren’t detectives. They are, however, super observant and naturally good at investigating. Based on the way this book ended, one can assume that Baxter will be the main character in each book, solving mysteries from one story to the next.
A proper London butler for the past 25 years, Baxter left his previous long-term employer due to a scandal and now finds himself in the employ of Anya Kovács. Anya plans to send Baxter to butler for private events and parties. His first job takes place in a rental property in Cannes, and in this case, Anya asked Baxter to report back on the financial dealings of one of the clients. While this goes against Baxter’s code of ethics, Anya leaves him little choice since she basically saved his reputation.
When one of the guests winds up dead in the pool, everyone is a suspect…including the household staff Baxter hired. I don’t want to give away the victim or everyone’s motives. Suffice it to say, there are several. Any good mystery will have a lot of motives. The question becomes who had the biggest motive?
Baxter seems like the perfect type of character to solve the mystery here. One of the things he points out is that it’s amazing what clients will say in front of the household staff…as if they aren’t even in the room. There are several places he describes the role of the butler.
- “A good butler saw everything but said nothing—was on hand when needed and yet never in the way. Baxter worked hard to be invisible.”
- “It was the curse of the service industry that when a job was done badly, clients were extremely vocal about it, yet when it was done well, no one passed comment. Baxter had thus learned to take silence as its own form of positive feedback.”
- “Baxter was always the last to retire and the first to rise, and if that meant operating on only a few hours’ sleep, so be it.”
When I first started reading the book, I expected an older gentleman—probably because I play The Sims and all the butlers are elders. But the fact that Baxter has been working as a butler for 25 years leads me to believe he’s probably no older than 50. He’s reserved, observant, discreet, poised…everything you would imagine a butler to be. In his role, he is expected to bring any additional household staff (in this case, a housekeeper and chef) and is basically the head of the house. But we also get to see his empathetic side in dealing with Red. He’s a great character, and I’m looking forward to seeing him in future stories.
This was a quick and easy read at only 200ish pages—a classic whodunit that will keep you guessing. You might even be wondering if the butler did it. 😉
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