Disordered Daggers : The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware (2019)

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With the Dagger longlists due to be announced next month, it’s time to reactivate the reading scheme.  All the submissions are now listed on the CWA website.  Ruth Ware’s latest book has been put forward in the Gold and Steel categories.

“The Turn of the Key” is told as a series of letters from prison, as our narrator, a young nanny hired to look after the children of a two high flying professional architects, makes a case for her defence. She had answered a job advert that seemed too good to be true – a live-in position, handsomely remunerated, looking after four children in a remote Highland mansion. The parents, the Ellincourts, have transformed the interior of the building : it’s as if Thornfield Hall had been given a makeover on Grand Designs. The traditional stone flagged kitchen and children’s bedrooms are lit, heated and monitored by a smart app (which even has different menus to deliver the perfect shower.)  The children’s mother is bright and friendly, the father is a bit off, and there’s a warning note in the nanny’s bedroom from a previous occupant of the role.  It is, indeed,  too good to be true…

Ruth Ware’s title deliberately alludes to “The Turn of the Screw”, another tale of a nanny in trouble, and the best writing in the book is when it appears to be turning into an all-out ghost story. The poison garden behind the house is a delicious metaphor for the corruption behind the attractive façade of Scottish countryside and imposing architecture – there’s a grisly momentum to the unfolding catastrophe. I had some issues with the multiple twists that cascade across the pages at the end – could a sustained campaign of malevolence really be achieved by its perpetrator?  Could a sealed letter of confession really be delivered without its contents being discovered?  Given one particular case of identity, wouldn’t a CRB check give the game away?  Ruth Ware’s storytelling nearly overcomes these objections, but there are only so many impossible things that I can believe before breakfast.