The Only One Left by Riley Sager

At seventeen, Lenora Hope/ Hung her sister with a rope

Stabbed her father with a knife/ Took her mother’s happy life

“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said/ But she’s the only one not dead

Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a whealchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer - I want to tell you everything.

As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth - and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.

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Buckle in, it’s been a long time since I’ve done a negative review! This book had such an amazing premise. Based off of a Lizzie-Borden-esque murder, I thought this had so much potential to be Sager’s best work. It, unfortunately, is my least favourite of all of his books. It was a slow started but definitely picked up and became un-put-downable 1/4 of the way through. However, this book could have been half its length (300+ pages). My biggest peeve with this book was that the mystery got so stretched out between “regular” daily-life content that I lost interest pretty quick when I should have been on the edge of my seat (ie the entire second half). I also found the twists to go too far to the point that we twisted ourselves into incoherency. I really didn’t enjoy this book and I can’t give it more than 2 stars.

We start of with Kit, a disgraced home-care aide that is grieving the loss of her mother and the crumbling relationship with her father. She gets the opportunity to move out of her depressing childhood home and into the mysterious mansion on the cliff where notorious Lenora Hope, family murderer, lives in her old age. As Kit moves to the house, meets the suspicious staff, and sees Lenora for herself, she realizes that there may be more to the past than what people know and that, the more she finds out, the more danger she is in in the present. It made for a really thrilling start to the novel and even with the lag in plot, I do think it could have been a fun, fast, thrilling read if condensed down by about 200 pages.

My favourite parts of this story were the setting and the supporting characters. An old mansion on a cliff that hasn’t been updated since 1929 that is slowly falling into the sea? Downton Abbey-esque staff that wear uniforms and keep formalities from pre-war eras? It gave such a good haunted house/place stuck in time setting to this creepy tale. There’s also a lot of focus in this book of the house being crooked and making the characters feel off because of that which was such a great nod to Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. It also did a great job adding to the mystery. Were those footsteps or was that some rocks falling down the cliffside? Did you hear a door slam or was that a shutter falling off the house? It made the mystery harder to guess at.

My least favourite part of this book was the twists. The last 100 pages had so much flying at us after almost an entire book of extremely slow pacing that I was almost overwhelmed with information. I do think it would have been an enjoyable, if not really that amazing, if not for the ridiculousness that happened in the last 1/4 of this book. I understand twists needing to take us by surprise and maybe sometimes slightly confusing us until all is said and done, but I should not have to flip back through most of the book and reread/research what I’d actually read for the conclusion to make sense. There were names and plots and small moments pointed out that I had zero recollection of. Was this because it was not clear enough in the foreshadowing to actually BE foreshadowing? Or was it because the mystery was stretched into more pages than needed for unnecessary information that we forgot key parts of the story? It felt like this book became multiple mystery plots in one and the overlap didn’t make sense.

Overall, this may be the least enjoyable thriller I’ve read to date. I love Sager but this one just did not hit right for me. Keep in mind, this is all personal opinion and I seem to be in the minority of people who didn’t like this book so take my review with a grain of salt. I gave this one 2 stars because although I was intrigued enough to finish it, I did not think it was an enjoyable read.