The Turn Of The Key

Ruth Ware’s newest novel, The Turn Of The Key, blends the creepily invasive smarthome of The Girl Before with the highland isolation of The Hunting Party.  Rowan, a nursery worker in London, finds a too-good-to-be-true job posting as a live-in nanny in a beautiful home in the highlands… but she also needs to be too-good-to-be-true to get it.

Rowan finds endless troubles at the house. The kids are either little jerks testing the limits of a new babysitter (who may not be quite as experienced as she claims), or bringing freakish messages from beyond the grave.  The smarthome allows the distant parents to watch her at any time, and sometimes the app that controls everything from locks to lights has a mind of its own. There’s also a history of little girls dying or disappearing on this property…

I’ve really enjoyed the twists and reversals in Ruth Ware’s other books,  like The Death of Mrs. Westaway and The Lying Game. Yes, I know The Woman In Cabin 10 is the one everyone else likes, but it just didn’t pull me in the way her other novels did. Rich people using endless wealth, power and connections to be Extremely Evil isn’t nearly as compelling as regular people pushed to do awful things to keep their secrets hidden.  In The Turn Of The Key, I was pulled in by Rowan wanting the job and then wanting to stay in the luxurious house, and even when I worked out her first secret, I was stunned by the following ones. 

I really enjoyed this page-turner, but I didn’t love the flash-forward opening. There’s a payoff in the end, sure, but I thought the letter to a solicitor from jail took the suspense down a bit. (Also, I tend to find epistolary novels forced and artificial.)

This is another not-gory pageturner, and a great successor to The Lying Game and The Death of Mrs. Westaway.

The Turn Of The Key will be released on August 6, 2019, I received an advance copy for honest review. (Free books have never stopped me from snarking about a bad novel.)