Title: The Turn of the Key

Author: Ruth Ware

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 344

Rating: 4/5

I’ve read a few of Ruth Ware’s books by this point, and I’m pretty sure that this is her best one yet. There have been pretty obvious problems with all of the others, but this one was pretty solid all of the way through. It also had that quality that you want from a thriller where it kind of forces you to keep reading so that you can find out exactly what’s going on.

It has a little bit of everything, and the fact that the protagonist is a nanny and there are ghosts involved almost reminded me of Henry James. But it’s also definitely a modern read, and it’s a pretty solid take on the thriller genre. I feel like Ware’s previous work has just been derivative of other thrillers, while this one finally brings something kind of new to it.

At the same time, it does still rely on a lot of the same tropes that we’re used to, but I thought that it did them pretty well. It uses that whole thing of having it open after the primary events of the novel, with our protagonist telling a lawyer that she’s innocent of murder and that she needs some help.

Then it takes us back to the start as she tells us her story from start to finish. That doesn’t always work well, but because it was used sparingly, it didn’t feel as though it kept stopping the action just for us to be reminded that we’re reading a story.

And so most of the time, we’re just following the story through from start to finish, and it does a good job of taking us along for the ride. I also quite liked the way that it referred to smart home technology, although it was a little clunky. It was just weird to me, as a Google Home user, that people were so in awe.

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