Platform Seven manages to be both rooted in the horror of human evil – “Sometimes, it’s like you’re trying to give me a glimpse of what you’d be like if you were a bad person,” Lisa says to her boyfriend at one point, careful to keep a light laugh in her voice as she tries to steer him on to a better path, and tinged with supernatural terrors: “My cold anger rises and rises inside me until I bloat like an unspeakable thing,” Lisa tells us, as the reality of how she has ended up in this situation becomes clear. Malign presences stalk this tale and the Apple Tree Yard author goes on to unravel a scarily plausible story of emotional abuse and coercive control, one that led to Lisa Evans’s death and which will go on to play out in the lives of many other women, unless young British Transport Police officer PC Akash Lockhart can dig deeper into her apparent suicide. For much of the book, she is unable to remember her own story, tethered to Peterborough station and its surroundings, as she wonders how she came to die on platform seven two years earlier, and what led a man to the same place. The ghost in Louise Doughty’s Platform Seven offers a different kind of haunting.

Ware tells a cracking tale and, as in her breakout novel In a Dark, Dark Wood, the house itself plays a hugely menacing part in proceedings. Left on her own with the children almost from the start, things quickly go from bad to worse – creaking footsteps at night, lost keys, a walled garden filled with poisonous plants, a history of hauntings.

She learns that the four previous incumbents have resigned in the past 14 months, but takes the job anyway, despite the discovery of an ominous note left by her predecessor and the desperate pleading of one of her new charges to stay away because “the ghosts wouldn’t like it”. And I didn’t kill that child.” The Turn of the Key then shifts back in time and Rowan tells her story from her discovery of an advert looking for a “practical, unflappable” nanny to look after four children in the wilds of Scotland.

I am the nanny in the Elincourt case, Mr Wrexham. “I guess it comes down to this in the end. Written from prison, they plead with him to take her on as a client. Rowan, the narrator of Ruth Ware’s spooky, tense thriller about an apparent haunting in the Highlands, starts her story with a bundle of letters to a barrister.

Ruth ware the turn of the key review