Once, cleaning up after dinner, she found the words “we hate you” floating in a bowl of alphabet pasta. In Rowan’s telling, she had barely arrived at the job when ominous things began to happen: First she stumbled upon a locked garden filled with poisonous plants then she discovered an attic strewn with broken china dolls and thick black feathers, its walls graffitied with threats. “The Turn of the Key” unfolds as a letter to a prospective lawyer from that nanny, Rowan Caine, who’s in jail awaiting trial for the murder. In Ware’s latest - a nod to “The Turn of the Screw” - a nanny arrives at an isolated country house in the Scottish Highlands, and before long, one of her charges is dead. He switches narrators with each chapter, a technique that can be irritating when done badly but that works beautifully here it keeps you off-balance and grasping for some footing as you hurtle from Amanda’s squad car to Jake’s lonely bedroom to the Whisper Man’s prison cell. There are two threads here - the supernatural one and the police-procedural one - and North does a fine job knitting them together. So does Pete Willis, the detective assigned to the original cases who’s basically become a walking cliché: tormented, guilt-ridden and sad. Is there a copycat killer? Or did the Whisper Man have an accomplice, someone who’s surfaced to kill again? When another little boy disappears from the town, D.I. That would be alarming in and of itself, but 20 years ago, a serial killer nicknamed “the Whisper Man” abducted and murdered five children in the village this way. Then Jake begins hearing something even more sinister, a strange voice crooning outside his window at night, begging to come in the house.

Jake is no help: He tells Tom “it was the boy in the floor” talking. … Was it possible someone else had come in?” He rushes to check on his boy but finds him alone. “The voice was too old and throaty for that. “It didn’t sound like a child at all,” Tom thinks.

But then he overhears one of them threaten Jake. His father, Tom, believes his shy young son is adjusting to life in a new town by dreaming up imaginary friends. Remember Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense,” the “I see dead people” kid? He’s got nothing on 7-year-old Jake Kennedy, who doesn’t just see dead people - he hears them and talks to them, too.

Turn of the key ruth ware