The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In this novel, Rowan is the narrator, a young woman writing letters from jail, where she is incarcerated for murdering a child, pleading for help. In flashbacks, we learn Rowan takes a nannying job in a restored Victorian on the remote outskirts of a Scottish village for a married pair of architects who have painstakingly updated a Victorian house so that it is now a strange amalgam of the traditional and the ultra modern — fingerprint panels, cameras, voice commands, every trapping of a smart home. Under Rowan’s care are two young girls and their infant sister; a fourth teenage girl is at boarding school and rarely home. From the beginning, the assignment is unsettling. The vast home and its grounds are the stuff of local legends — untimely deaths, fleeing nannies, an ancient garden of poisonous plants. The pay is good and Rowan is determined to ride it out, but the unsettling oddities quickly creep beneath her skin. Just what is going on beneath the bones of this home, who’s to blame for its strangeness, and is someone trying to drive Rowan away? Who died — and what role did Rowan play? Another Ruth Ware page-turner.
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