Review: The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

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.

Kindle,  384 pages

Published August 6th 2019

by Simon & Schuster

***

I will freely admit to getting caught up in the hype for this book. Simon & Schuster graciously provided me with an ARC and I jumped in. I've never read anything by Ruth Ware before.

The book pretty well starts on a high with some letter writing, but it seems to go on and on, I honestly was afraid that would be the format for the whole book. Not that I have anything against this format, when done correctly it can be great.  But here it didn't exactly work for me and  I know I am going against the consensus with my thoughts.

I have a habit of not reading the blurb or forgetting some of the details when I get around to reading something, in this case it might have backfired. The death of a child is a touchy subject for me and I might have shied away from this one. But I persevered and after 10% I couldn’t get into the writing style. I like first-person POV’s but feel sometimes that lends itself perfectly in audiobook format. So that’s what I did, I bailed and grabbed the audio from Scribd.

I’m glad I went that route just for the simple fact that once I was invested I needed to know what was going on.  The audio was perfect in that I could finish it off faster and know what happened to put myself out of my misery, so to speak.  So kudos to the author for evoking that feeling in me. I had to suspend my belief too many times and that might have left a bad taste.  I found this book to be rather creepy and actually disturbing.  There is so much build-up and the ending was, disappointing. Oh, I get cliff hangers and all that but I didn't get the closure I craved and honestly needed. It almost felt like the author either had a deadline or word count to adhere to and wham it's done!

 All in all, it was an ok read, I'll probably try another Ware book sometime in the future.

My thanks to Simon & Schuster (via Netgalley) for an ARC.