turn of the key signed edition ruth ware

“There is one thing I must make you aware of up front, in case it affects your enthusiasm for the post. After all, what sane job candidate would proceed with the interview process after receiving this letter of invitation from her prospective employer:

Again, like James’ governess - one of literature’s most unreliable narrators - Rowan can be vague, particularly about her reasons for pursuing this particular job so doggedly. (Cleverly, then, “The Turn of the Key” opens on the very same horrifying situation that “The Turn of the Screw” concludes on: the alleged murder of a child by a governess.) Rowan’s story unfolds in halting fashion through these letters, in which she describes how she came to take the position at Heatherbrae House in the remote Scottish Highlands and how things turned ghastly as soon as her employers - a posh couple with their own architecture practice - depart the premises to attend a faraway trade show.Īnother thing we readers know from the get-go is that Rowan is not quite leveling with us. Rowan has been charged with the murder of one of the four children who’d been under her care. Ware introduces her through a series of letters she’s writing to a renowned barrister from the prison cell where she’s languishing.

We readers know that 27-year-old governess Rowan Caine is in torment from the very first pages. Ware sets her tale in an old mansion that’s been renovated into a “smart house.” So sinister is the home’s thick assortment of blinking surveillance cameras, talking refrigerators, embedded phone and speaker systems, and misfiring lights and locks that it’s a toss-up as to whether the alleged ghosts or the rogue gadgets are ultimately responsible for shattering our poor heroine’s fragile nerves. “The Turn of the Key” pays scrupulous homage to James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and also slyly updates it. Happily, the answer is: a superb suspense writer who is dead set on making her own distinctive mark on the governess-alone-with-weird-children-in-an isolated-house formula. Ware sets expectations even higher by burdening her new novel with a brazen title: “The Turn of the Key.” What kind of suspense writer would be so reckless as to invoke Henry James’ masterpiece of terror and ambiguity and expect to see her own work do anything but suffer in the comparison? Westaway,” was one of the best mystery novels of 2018, brilliantly repurposing just about every cobwebby prop in the Gothic warehouse, including a disputed inheritance, a crumbling ancestral mansion and a terrified-but-plucky young heroine. Ruth Ware’s latest suspense novel has a lot to measure up to.

'The Turn of the Key' by Ruth Ware Scout Press (336 pages, $27.99) (Scout Press) Photo: Scout Press, HO / TNS

Turn of the key signed edition ruth ware