The Turn of the Key
Score: 4.5/5 Bookmarks
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware is a suspenseful and creepy tale of a girl who takes a nanny position in a remote area of Scottland, for a family who are definitely not as perfect as they seem at first. The intrigue deepens as the house appears to be haunted, a poisonous garden is discovered, and…well I won’t ruin it for you.
The book is told from our heroine’s point of view, written in letters from prison. Where she is awaiting trial for murder.
I dropped half a point for the ending not being as resolved as I would have liked but otherwise I really enjoyed it.
I listened to the audiobook on Libro.fm and it was very well narrated by Imogen Church. She also does wonderful accents, and I could listen to her Scottish one all day. If you’d like to listen to it you can get 3-for-1 audiobooks by using my code ‘LatestBookCrush’ here. And if you’d like the physical copy of the book, click the button below.
Synopsis:
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.
