The Turn of the Key

She's searching for something else entirely when she comes on the advertisement. However, the chance to take advantage of a live-in nanny position with an astronomically high pay appears too wonderful to pass up. And Rowan Caine is enthralled with Heatherbrae House from the moment she arrives—smitten by the picture-perfect family, the stunning Scottish Highlands, and the opulent "smart" mansion furnished with all the latest amenities.

She has no idea that she is about to enter a nightmare in which a kid will die and she will be imprisoned as she awaits a murder trial.

She tries to explain the unfolding circumstances that led to her detention in a letter to her lawyer from behind bars. It wasn't only the cameras positioned all around the home watching over them all the time, or the broken equipment that abruptly shut off the lights or awakened everyone up with loud music. Not only the females disappointed her, but they proved to be quite different from the well-behaved model kids she had seen during her interview. It wasn't even the fact that she was abandoned for weeks on end, with no grownups in sight except Jack Grant, the mysterious handyman.

It was all of it.

She is aware of her errors. She acknowledges that she misled in order to get the job and that she didn't always act in the best ways towards the kids. She is by no means innocent. She insists, however, that she is innocent—at least not of murder. It implies that someone else is.

A gripping thriller reminiscent of Agatha Christie, The Turn of the Key is full of captivating dread and written in Ruth Ware's distinctive tense way.