This….book. I was twenty minutes late returning from lunch because of it, I burned a pizza because of it, I didn’t even notice the thunderstorm was over and it was safe to go in the pool I was housesitting because of it. It’s so absorbing and yet…GAH! Such a frustrating ending. Rowan Caine just saw the job of a lifetime: live-in nanny to four kids (three, really, one is at boarding school) at a generous salary. Sure, it’s in the middle of the boondocks, but the family is loaded and there’s no shortage of entertainment or landscape to gawk at. There is the matter of the family having run off the previous four nannies — within the span of a year –but Rowan is made of sterner stuff. No little hellions can get the better of her, she’s a Childcare Professional! From the start, it’s apparent that there’s something…..off about this place. The house is a jarring fusion of traditional architecture and gee-whiz modernism, complete with smart infrastructure that does everything from ordering food to offering live surveillance of everything but the bathrooms — and the kids are a mess. The toddler is a toddler, fine, but Ellie seems traumatized and Maddie is a manipulative little psycho. But there’s something spooky about the place, forboding even. There’s a poison garden on the premises (which Rowan is tricked by the kids into visiting), and a “closet door” that’s really a boarded-up entrance to an attic area that is “I would run away in terror right now if I were not responsible for feeding these brats”-level unsettling. Between the smarthome malfunctioning, the kids being psychological basketcases, and the constant Poltergeist-esque weirdness, this kept me riveted — and with one twist late in the book, I was primed for anything. I mean….you’ve got an isolated young woman who is living in constant stress, deprived by music, living in a house where inexplicable things are happening, and through all this there’s the fog of “Maybe this is a horror story and not just a thriller, maybe there are evil ghosts!“. And then…explosion on the pad, aborted takeoff, pick your metaphor. It’s just over all of a sudden, and not only is the ending anticlimactic, but it doesn’t resolve anything. There’s a lot right about this book — the way Ware frames it as being written from premise, the joint creepiness of the main character being surveilled by either a creepy boss or ghosts — but the ending just fizzled. I can’t say I wasn’t completely entertained, though!