The Turn of the Key by: Ruth Ware

⭐️⭐️.5

You know how sometimes you read a book that you feel kind of lukewarm about, but once you sit down and talk with a friend about it, you have such a great discussion that you find yourself loving it after all? Well...this book was the opposite.

"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 unravelling 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."

- from Storygraph

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I will say, the overall reading experience was good. It was fast-paced, twisty, and I loved the constant guessing about the possibility of the paranormal. I really like a book that gives away the ending from the very beginning, and makes you spend the whole book wondering how you're going to get there.

Now, here's where things fell flat for me. This book didn't properly follow the rule of Chekhov's Gun – all throughout, so many different things were brought up and introduced that didn't ever end up actually "firing". I'm assuming this was to create a bit of misdirection, but what ended up happening was we spent so much time on all these different misdirections that the final reveal was rushed and lacked impact. I love when you can look back at the end of a story and see how all these various dropped clues that seemed insignificant in the moment actually added up to the big picture, but that's just not what happened here.

Another thing that really bothered me was the fact that the story really centers around the two girls – who are 5 and 8 years old. And when it's revealed what actually happened and what these girls did, it just simply does not make sense for a child of that age. The girls supposedly did and said things that would be either physically, mentally, or emotionally beyond what they should be able to do, and also their involvement leaves me overall unsatisfied and even uncomfortable with how it ended.

I'm a big stickler for how books end, and this book really proves how important a good ending can be, because what was a very enjoyable experience wrapped up in a very rushed and dissatisfying way and it shows in my star rating.

- Prompts completed:

• 2022 Once Upon a Book Club Reading Challenge (A Once Upon a Book Club Selection)

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Content Warnings: Child Death, Sexual Harassment, Blood