Book Review: The Turn of the Key

Ruth Ware dials up the chills and thrills in her latest work The Turn of the Key, an intense psychological slow-burn of tightly plotted suspense and twists with a 24-year-old Rowan Caine as its central protagonist, who comes down to the remote Scottish Highlands to be a full-time live-in nanny for the Elincourt family. And oh, did I mention she is also an unreliable narrator? With the architect couple Bill and Sandra often travelling for work, Rowan is left to care for their children all by herself, and that's only the start of the nightmare as a string of strange and eerie goings on question her sanity, before it all culminates in the death of a child and she finds herself behind bars awaiting trial for a crime she didn't commit. Or did she? There's an atmosphere of ghostly dread that Ware builds so convincingly, and while there's none of the gimmicky point of view narrative (the whole story is told through Rowan's eyes), the denouement — when it arrives — deflates the tension and the voltage drops. Nonetheless, a fine addition to the locked room mystery canon.