Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of In a Dark, Dark Wood, The Woman in Cabin 10, The Lying Game, and The Death of Mrs. Westaway comes Ruth Ware’s highly anticipated fifth novel.

When she stumbles across the ad, she’s looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss—a live-in nannying post, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten—by the luxurious “smart” home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by this picture-perfect family.

What she doesn’t know is that she’s stepping into a nightmare—one that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder.

Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the unravelling events that led to her incarceration. It wasn’t just the constant surveillance from the cameras installed around the house, or the malfunctioning technology that woke the household with booming music, or turned the lights off at the worst possible time. It wasn’t just the girls, who turned out to be a far cry from the immaculately behaved model children she met at her interview. It wasn’t even the way she was left alone for weeks at a time, with no adults around apart from the enigmatic handyman, Jack Grant.

It was everything.

She knows she’s made mistakes. She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn’t always ideal. She’s not innocent, by any means. But, she maintains, she’s not guilty—at least not of murder. Which means someone else is.

Ruth Ware is one of those authors who delivers clever, imaginative stories again and again. Turn of the Key joins her earlier work and more than lives up to the hype and anticipation surrounding its publication. With nods to classics like Turn of the Screw and Rebecca, Ware tells an imaginative tale of an emotionally damaged young woman dropped into the middle of one of the strangest family situations I’ve read in a very long time. Ware takes the remote-old-house trope and drags it into the 21st century by adding smart-house technology, thereby creating a truly all-seeing, electronic “Mrs. Danvers,” which is enough to make anyone shiver in their boots.

As she does, Ware drops bombs of information gradually throughout the story, which serve to keep the reader saying “just one more page,” and which had me reading well into the night. The final bombshell was one that I had thought about but dismissed as too awful, but there it was…making me put the book down, close my eyes, and sigh deeply.

One of the things I appreciate about Ware’s writing is her subtle but well-crafted attention to characters and their relationships. In Death of Mrs. Westaway, the relationship between siblings was key; here it’s the relationship between fathers and daughters that sparks and drives the action, creating layer upon layer of plot.

I look forward to more from Ms. Ware’s imagination! Recommended.

Publication Date: August 6, 2019
Published By: Gallery Pocket Scout
Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy