BLURB:

Ruth Ware, the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller returns with another page-turning psychological thriller.

When she stumbles across the advert, she’s looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss: a live-in nanny position, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan 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 her in a cell awaiting trial for murder.

She knows she’s made mistakes. But, she maintains, she’s not guilty – at least not of murder. Which means someone else is.

Full of spellbinding menace, The Turn of the Key is a gripping modern-day haunted house thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.

MY THOUGHTS:

I got this book as a Christmas present from my husband and I have to say that I have quite enjoyed it.

At the beginning, I really liked that it seemed to be written in some sort of epistolary form, but that feel got lost soon after that, when the narration stopped using the letter format. Except for a few of random times when the narrator addressed the person who would be the recipient of said letter, the narration itself didn’t have that epistolary feel that we get in other novels that belong to that specific genre or style.

I was expecting sort of a ghost story with gothic elements, and pretty much I got that, but the gothic aspects got lost among all the technology paraphernalia and the minutia of daily life. Don’t get me wrong, it was still quite a thrilling read, but a smart house is not what I would expect as the setting for a gothic-like ghost story.

As for the characters, it was obvious from the beginning that there was something going on with pretty much all of them, and I enjoyed trying to figure out what their role in the story could be. A couple of predictable things, but overall quite intriguing. The main character/narrator wasn’t very likeable from the beginning, and I got the feeling that she wasn’t very reliable. I liked how some characters had a lot of presence even if they weren’t really there.

If you like stories in the same fashion as The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, or The Sundial, by Shirley Jackson, this is the perfect book for you.

To sum up, it was a great story and I cannot wait to read more from this author. I give this book… 4 TEA CUPS!