Rowan’s employers, Bill and Sandra Elincourt, mum with four who also runs an architectural firm with her husband and renowned architect. You start by isolating your protagonist sufficiently to ensure the heeby-jeebies for narrator and reader alike. Frankly, the only sympathetic character in the lot of them is Rowan herself, an ordinary voice amidst the twistedness of the rest of the characters, though I like the descriptions of Jack’s muscles moving beneath his t-shirt (once a romance reader, always a romance reader). Her letters describe how Rowan came to work for the Elincourts and was broken by the mysterious goings-on in their Highlands-set, gothic, renovated-uber-mansion, Heatherbrae House: creaking footsteps, smart-home insanity, Alexa gone rogue, fractious, peevish children, and one sexy handyman/groundskeeper, Jack Grant. Wrexham, with a reputation for acquitting the “no-hopes”, will take on her case. Rowan recounts how she came to be arrested, tried, and convicted in the hope that Mr. Wrexham from her cell in HMP Charnworth after being convicted of killing one of her former employers’ children. Ware’s Key opens with Rowan writing to barrister Mr. As it stands, narrator Rowan Caine is what you’d get if Bridget Jones was trapped in a horror-gothic-thriller, which made her a heck of a lot more likeable than the anonymous prig James created. Had the first-person narrator/voice been anything like James’s governess, I would’ve DNF-ed.

In The Turn of the Key, I got a fairly satisfying hybrid between atmospheric James and contemporary feminist gothic.

Westaway that I wanted to try one of her books. But I’d heard and read reviewers and Twitter friends praise Ware’s The Woman In Cabin 10 and The Death of Mrs. I like my gothic with a good streak of romance, like Jane Eyre, and female protagonists with a brain in their head, like Jane, like Stewart’s, Kearsley’s, and St. I hate James’s twisted, labyrinthine sentences, his dunce of a narrator, and the creepy setting. I side-eyed Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key because it nods at James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” one classic I’ve abhorred since I had the misfortune to read it in a 19th century lit class.

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