Author: Ruth Ware
Year Published: 2019
Genre: Adult fiction
Pages: 336
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location (my 2019 Google Reading map): UK
FTC Disclosure: I bought this book with my own money
Summary (from the inside flap of the book): When Rowan Caine stumbles across the ad, she's looking for something else completely. But i seems like too good an opportunity to miss--a live-in nanny post, with a staggerlingly 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 this 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 handyman, Jack Grant.
It was everything.
She knows she's made a mistake. 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.
Review: I have been hearing so much about this book that I just had to read it. This is a good thriller, but I was trying to read it in the middle of a Netflix binge so it took me far too long. So, I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it last night.
The last third of this book is where all the action happens, before that it feels a bit repetitive. The last two pages slam the reader upside the head. What an ending! Do not cheat by reading the end ahead of time (I know some of you do this sometimes), it will ruin the whole book for you.
This is a difficult book to describe because I don't want to give away any of the story and you can read the summary above. Rowan is competent, which makes the creepy stuff happening in the house scarier; if she can't handle it, who can?! And most of the characters seems so nice, it's tough to tell if one of them is the creeper. If I lived in that house, I would have been gone way before I could have been charged with murder.
I liked that the book is told in letters to Rowan's lawyer. We get her side of the story as well as her reactions to prison and her arrest. Is she guilty? Is she where she belongs? Has she gone crazy? You'll have to read the book to find out.
Challenges for which this counts: none
FTC Disclosure: I bought this book with my own money
Summary (from the inside flap of the book): When Rowan Caine stumbles across the ad, she's looking for something else completely. But i seems like too good an opportunity to miss--a live-in nanny post, with a staggerlingly 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 this 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 handyman, Jack Grant.
It was everything.
She knows she's made a mistake. 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.
Review: I have been hearing so much about this book that I just had to read it. This is a good thriller, but I was trying to read it in the middle of a Netflix binge so it took me far too long. So, I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it last night.
The last third of this book is where all the action happens, before that it feels a bit repetitive. The last two pages slam the reader upside the head. What an ending! Do not cheat by reading the end ahead of time (I know some of you do this sometimes), it will ruin the whole book for you.
This is a difficult book to describe because I don't want to give away any of the story and you can read the summary above. Rowan is competent, which makes the creepy stuff happening in the house scarier; if she can't handle it, who can?! And most of the characters seems so nice, it's tough to tell if one of them is the creeper. If I lived in that house, I would have been gone way before I could have been charged with murder.
I liked that the book is told in letters to Rowan's lawyer. We get her side of the story as well as her reactions to prison and her arrest. Is she guilty? Is she where she belongs? Has she gone crazy? You'll have to read the book to find out.
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