Summary

The Turn of the Key is a crime thriller published in 2019 by international best-selling author Ruth Ware. The book joined several others penned by Ware as both a critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times bestseller, a Sunday Times bestseller, and named Thriller of the Month by Waterstones. Other thrillers by Ware include In a Dark, Dark Wood (2015), The Lying Game (2017), The Death of Mrs. Westaway (2018), and One by One (2020). Some of Ware’s books have won, or been nominated for, major book awards, and three have been optioned for the screen.

The Turn of the Key is primarily told through the voice of Rowan Caine in a letter she is writing from prison to a lawyer named Mr. Wrexham. Rowan begins by maintaining her innocence in the death of one of the children in her care, insisting that she did not kill the girl. She then recounts how she came to be in her current circumstances, explaining to Mr. Wrexham that it starts with her application for a well-paying nanny position at Heatherbrae House in the Scottish Highlands. To her surprise, Rowan, who has been working at a daycare center in London, is invited for an interview. Upon arrival, she meets matriarch Sandra Elincourt along with her three youngest daughters: 8-year-old Maddie, 5-year-old Ellie, and the baby, Petra. She learns that the eldest, 14-year-old Rhiannon, is away at boarding school. Despite Sandra’s warnings about the house’s notorious history, Rowan takes an immediate liking to Heatherbrae and the Elincourt family—and decides she wants nothing more than to work for them.

Shortly after Rowan returns to London following her interview, she is offered the job. She goes back to Heatherbrae with a naïve optimism. On her first night, patriarch Bill Elincourt makes a sexual advance toward her, which leaves her with a crushing sense of disappointment. When Bill and Sandra unexpectedly depart the next day, the job immediately reveals itself to be much more demanding than Rowan anticipated. Sandra leaves an intimidating binder of rules and the unreliable Happy app, which controls the state-of-the-art technology throughout the house. Rowan has a difficult time figuring out how to use the technology and feels unsettled by the surveillance camera she discovers in her room—which she quickly covers. She also fails to bond with the Elincourt children, seeking the help of the young and handsome Jack Grant, one of the Elincourts other employees.

As Rowan attempts to navigate life at Heatherbrae, she discovers that the house has a sordid past. Several deaths have occurred there, the most recent of which was the daughter of the previous owner. She allegedly ate poisoned berries from the garden that sits at the back of the property. At night, Rowan hears mysterious creaking sounds above her that resemble pacing. Maddie tells her that the former owner, Kendrick Grant, paced in sorrow every night following his daughter’s death. Maddie and Ellie show Rowan how to sneak inside the garden. At the center stands a statue of Achlys, the Greek goddess of misery, death, and poison. Rowan finds the garden and statue disturbing.

As the Elincourt daughters remain surly and difficult, Rowan feels her composure quickly unraveling. She tried to erect the façade of being a perfect nanny, but the challenges of the house prove overwhelming. She increasingly succumbs to paranoia as the creaking sounds and other inexplicable events keep her awake at night. She continues to seek the guidance and comfort of Jack, but in her panicked state, she begins to suspect that he might be responsible for the house’s strange activities. The Elincourt’s other employee, an older woman named Jean McKenzie, makes clear her dislike of Rowan and does not offer to help her.

Events soon come to a head when Rhiannon returns home. She reveals that she knows Rowan has been maintaining a fake identity and that she is actually a woman named Rachel Gerhardt. Rhiannon doesn’t know, however, that Rowan is also Bill’s daughter. Overcome with having been exposed, Rachel gets drunk and sleeps with Jack. When she returns from Jack’s flat across the property, she finds that Maddie is dead beneath her window. Two years after Rachel pens the letter to Mr. Wrexham, it’s found in a prison wall, along with a letter from Ellie confessing to pushing Maddie to her death. Ellie’s letter reveals that Rowan/Rachel had formed a relationship with her, which prompted her to turn on Maddie for using the house’s technology to try and drive Rowan/Rachel away. Maddie had been worried that she would have an affair with her father, as previous nannies had done, and tear their family apart. As the letters are found together in prison, Rachel’s whereabouts remain unknown.