Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key ** 1/2

You might think that adding mystery on top of mystery would be an effective way to enhance suspense in a thriller, but The Turn of the Key proves otherwise. It features a haunted house in the Scottish highlands, creepy modern surveillance technology, a narrator with secrets, malicious children, a poison garden, parents with puzzling motives, and suspicious servants who appear at unexpected intervals. Rather than harmonizing into an atmosphere of dread, the various elements work against each other. What caused all of the lights and the loud music to turn on in the dead of night? Ghosts? Technical glitch? One of the kids? The housekeeper? A "butt dial" from the mother to the smart house? The surfeit of possible explanations makes each incident less creepy.

One additional explanation the reader needs to consider for some discrepancies is sloppy writing. The narrator talks about how the young and handsome handyman flustered her; four paragraphs later she is "shy for no reason I could pin down." A sign of an unreliable narrator or a missing editor? There are enough examples of sloppy writing (such as Rowan not putting her top back on after washing it [p 65]) to make it a real possibility.