Plano Reads: The Turn of the Key – Plano Library Learns

Read our review of The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware, a Mystery Book Club pick for October.

You can join us to discuss The Turn of the Key on October 21 at 7 p.m. at Haggard Library in the Genealogy Program Room or you can attend through Zoom! If you would like to attend the meeting virtually, please register here. We will have things set up so that virtual and in-person attendees will all be able to see and hear each other!

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

Currently available through the PPL Catalog as well as L i bby.

Description from Libby: 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 events that led to her incarceration. It wasn’t just the constant surveillance from the home’s cameras, 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.

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—but somebody is.

Full of spellbinding menace and told in Ruth Ware’s signature suspenseful style, The Turn of the Key is an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.

Ruth Ware hits it out of the ballpark yet again with this suspenseful and modern twist on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Instead of the haunted estate featured in James’ tale, Ware’s young governess, Rowan, encounters a spooky smart house: a house that has a home automation system. As Rowan settles in to her nanny routine with her three young charges, creepy things begin happening in the house. We begin to wonder if something supernatural is afoot in Heatherbrae House or if Rowan is simply losing her grip on reality. Ware weaves her suspenseful story in such a way that both pays tribute to the original source material and blazes a new pathway. The Turn of the Key is the perfect novel for this spooky season!
–Emery, Librarian

Ruth Ware is an international number one bestseller. Her thrillers In a Dark, Dark Wood, The Woman in Cabin 10, The Lying Game, The Death of Mrs. Westaway and The Turn of the Key have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the Sunday Times and New York Times. Her books have been optioned for both film and TV, and she is published in more than 40 languages. Ruth lives near Brighton with her family.

-From the author’s website