Ware with All

Best-selling author Ruth Ware brings her dazzling talent to her new novel, The Turn Of The Key

- Yolanda Crous

If you’ve never spent a long weekend devouring a Ruth Ware thriller on a hammock, this is the summer to start. Her fifth novel, The Turn of the Key, is set in the Scottish Highlands and is as compulsively readable as you would expect a Ware book to be (see her previous best-sellers The Woman in Cabin 10, The Death of Mrs. Westaway, and In a Dark, Dark Wood, which were as lauded by critics as by readers). At Turn’s center is a nanny with secrets whose morality is questionable, a home with a reputedly haunted history replete with myriad “smart” devices, and—of course—a murder. Watch! spoke with Ware at the home she shares with her family in Sussex, on the south coast of England, to talk plot twists, unlikable characters, and the dangers of technology.

How would you describe your book to your readers?

A woman is in prison. She’s found herself in a terrible situation where her life has unraveled, and she’s writing to a person she believes might be able to solve it. The challenge of writing a book entirely in letters was technically interesting to me, if that’s not too geeky.

It’s a spooky novel. Do you believe in ghosts?