The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

'The queen of just-one-more-chapter does it again,' says the blurb on one of Ruth Ware's novels. And certainly, she lives up to that crown here. The Turn of the Key is a novel where we have a twenty-something nanny writing from prison where she's serving a sentence for killing one of her charges. There is an obvious reference to the Henry James story, The Turn of the Screw so I knew I had to prepare myself for a reasonably high level of creepiness.

Ware is a wiz at spooky houses and this one has it in spades. It's a large Victorian manor in a remote part of Scotland, with a rambling, overgrown garden, a part of which - walled and locked - is a secret garden and home to a collection of extremely poisonous plants. A former owner studied them, with tragic consequences - his ghost said to haunt the attics. But what makes this house particularly spooky is that it seems to have a mind of its own.

The owners of Heatherbrae, Sandra and Bill, are architects who have installed a state-of-the-art electronic system which controls locks, curtains, temperatures, lights and everything else you could think of. The fridge tells you when to buy more milk. There's also the Happy app, where nanny Rowan, and also Sandra and Bill, can watch what's happening in many of the rooms. Rowan puts a sock over the webcam in her bedroom, naturally.

The other thing Ware is great at is creating unreliable narrators. Rowan, writing to a barrister, attempting to put the record straight, is edgy from the start. But even from her first application to become Bill and Sandra's nanny, we know she's got a secret or two - which Ware cleverly uses to create a brilliant twist later in the book.

What with absentee parents, a Mrs Danvers style housekeeper, stories of ghosts and a poison garden, poor Rowan has more than enough to deal with before we even get to the kids. Here we have a  porridge throwing toddler, a troubled five-year-old; a devious eight-year-old and a wayward teen - alone enough to deter anyone from a career in childcare. No wonder it all soon goes very wrong.

The story builds gradually in tension, and even though I'm not wonderful with spooky stories, I found I just had to keep reading. There was always just enough logic for me to see that there could always be a non-supernatural explanation. With a few dramatic plot twists, one or two left till the very end, The Turn of the Key is a very satisfying read - one of Ware's best so far.

Posted by JAM

Catalogue link: The Turn of the Key