The house is a character in the book as it plays a major role. Can Rowan be trusted? Is she really innocent? We also question Rowan because we know she’s hiding things about herself. Rowan gets the feeling that the house is haunted because of its dark past. One of the girls is trouble for Rowan and the house starts to do weird things. We eventually learn she nannied for a family of four children in this high-tech smart house.

She is serving a sentence for the murder of one of the children she was nannying for. She wants him to know she’s innocent and didn’t do it. The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware is told in epistolary format, Rowan is writing to a solicitor, Mr. Which means someone else is.īook Review: The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware But, she maintains, she’s not guilty-at least not of murder. She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn’t always ideal. And 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 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 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. Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the unraveling events that led to her incarceration.

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. 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. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss-a live-in nannying post, with a staggeringly generous salary. When she stumbles across the ad, she’s looking for something else completely.

Book Summary: The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

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