The Turn of the Key

The Turn of the Key is a psychological thriller by the British writer Ruth Ware, published in 2019. It draws on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and moves that story into a modern setting.

Rowan Caine answers an advertisement for a live-in nanny and is offered the job, at a salary far above what the work should pay. The house is a modernised Victorian in the Scottish Highlands, fitted with cameras and an app for almost everything, and the family seems pleased with her.

By the end of the summer a child is dead and Rowan is in prison awaiting trial for murder. The novel is told as a letter she writes from her cell to a solicitor, setting out what she says really happened at the house.

Ware uses the smart-home technology as a source of both surveillance and doubt, so the house watches Rowan even as its faults make it hard to trust what the recordings show. It is a standalone novel, and it keeps the reader unsure how far Rowan's own account can be relied on.