The Turn of the Key

Content Overview

Overall Content
Severity
3.2

Language

10.0/10

Alcohol, Drugs, Smoking

1.5/10

Intimacy, Sex, Immodesty

1.7/10

Violence, Weapons, Crime, Blood

2.0/10

Potentially Intense Themes

1.0/10

**As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

My Opinion

3 out of 5 stars (3 / 5) This book is adult fiction, not YA. I don’t feel it lived up to the hype. Many readers claimed to have a creepy vibe throughout, but I didn’t get that. It was still entertaining and interesting but didn’t creep me out.

With that being said, the content was pretty minor, minus the language. There weren’t sex details and there weren’t violence details. Language was definitely excessive.

The Turn of the Key

Ruth Ware

When Rowan Caine stumbles across the ad, she’s looking for something else completely.  But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss– a live-in nanny post, with a staggeringly generous salary.  And when she arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten– by the luxurious “smart” home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by the picture-perfect family.

What she doesn’t know is that she’s stepping into a nightmare– one that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder.

Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the unraveling events that led to her incarceration.  It wasn’t just the constant surveillance from the cameras installed around the house, or the malfunctioning technology that woke the household with booming music or turned the lights off at the worst possible time.  It wasn’t just the girls, who turned out to be a far cry from the immaculately behaved model children she met at her interview. It wasn’t even the way she was left alone for weeks at a time, with no adults around apart from the enigmatic handy-man, Jack Grant.

It was everything. 

She knows she’s made mistakes.  She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn’t always ideal.  She’s not innocent, by any means. But, she maintains, she’s not guilty– at least not of murder. Which means someone else is.  

-Excerpt taken from the book flap.

Read more on Goodreads

Detailed Content Review

Language 

F***- 66

H***- 18

S***- 39

A**-

B****- 5

D***- 3

Bas****- 4

Religious Cursing-

J****- 16

Chr***- 3

G**- 48

L***-

Derogatory terms etc-

Bloody

Stupid c*nt 2

Slut-faced witch

Alcohol, Drugs, Smoking

When passed on a promotion, a woman drowns her sorrows in beer. 

A woman wants a cigarette but doesn’t want to smell like it. 

Two women drink wine with dinner. 

Two women smoke on a work break. 

A man pushes a drink towards a woman. She drinks while he talks and slurs his words. 

Two people have wine with dinner. 

A woman wants to open the bottle of scotch to calm her nerves. 

Women in prison “snort, and shoot and smoke their way to oblivion.”

A man suggests whiskey to help a woman calm down. The woman wants a cigarette. 

A woman smells alcohol on a 14year old. She is drunk again, later. 

A woman drinks 3 glasses of wine. A man offers her whiskey but she turns it down. He drinks. 

Intimacy, Sex, Immodesty

A woman takes off her top to clean it and a man walks in. She thinks, “I just boob-flashed your handyman.”

A man strokes a woman’s lip and nudges his knee between her legs. She cleans something on the floor and looks up at him and thinks, “While you’re down there love….”   He seemed to her like a man who “couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.”

A group of people are woken up in the middle of the night. The woman is braless in a small top and the man doesn’t have a shirt on. 

A woman wants a man to offer to stay the night with her. 

A man and woman kiss, bite, kiss very passionately then fumble taking off clothes.  After, they lay in each other’s arms and he slept on her breast. 

A young teen overhears her father telling another woman that he loved her and would leave his wife. Then the woman said all the things she wanted to do to him. The father has cheated before and has another family. 

Violence, Weapons, Crime, Blood

Women in prison are self-harmers, and scream and bang their heads on walls. 

A woman goes to slap a child but stops. 

Stories tell of a man drowning his wife and child in the bath, another shooting himself with a rifle.  Another was poisoned. 

A woman gets beat up in prison. 

A woman cuts her finger with glass. 

A young teen provokes a nanny until she hits her. 

A young girl is found on the ground, below a window with blood everywhere. She is dead. A woman is accused of throwing her out the window. 

Potentially Intense Themes

A woman is charged with murder but claiming innocence. 

Ghosts are rumored to haunt the house and land. Many things happen such as doorbells ringing, alarms going off, footsteps… This brings a creepy vibe throughout the book.

Purchase this Book

**As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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