Book Review: The Turn of the Key

Title: The Turn of the Key
Author: Ruth Ware
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press
Release Date: August 06, 2019
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Length: 337 pages
Source: Library
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Find it Here: Amazon // Goodreads

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 unraveling 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.

My Thoughts:

The Turn of the Key was the perfect book to get me back into reading. It has almost everything that I wanted at the time. This is the fourth book that I've read from Ruth Ware and she has quickly shot to the top of my list of auto-buy authors!

The creepiness in The Turn of the Key was what I loved the most about it! I kept wondering to myself: is this house really haunted or are the children just trying to scare her? It's what made me continue to come back to the book, I just had to know what was going on! I also liked that the story went into the history of the house and talked about some of the bad and tragic events that had happened there, which further led me to believe that maybe it was haunted!

Even though I liked the ending, I think some parts of it were a little unbelievable. I don't want to give away any spoilers, but if you've read it then you know what I'm talking about. Also, the whole premise of the book is that the main character, Rowan, is supposed to be writing a letter to a perspective lawyer. Who would write a 325 page letter? I just found some parts of the book to be a little far fetched. But I still really enjoyed The Turn of the Key and I think it was a really good mystery/thriller!