There’s a payoff in the end, sure, but I thought the letter to a solicitor from jail took the suspense down a bit. I really enjoyed this page-turner, but I didn’t love the flash-forward opening. 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. 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.

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.

I’ve really enjoyed the twists and reversals in Ruth Ware’s other books, like The Death of Mrs. There’s also a history of little girls dying or disappearing on this property… 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 it’s own. 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. Rowan finds endless troubles at the house. 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. 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.

The turn of the key novel