The Only One Left by Riley Sager
Published: 2023
Genre: Fiction; Mystery
Trigger Warnings: Graphic violence; references to suicide
Official Synopsis:
(from Amazon.com)
At seventeen, Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope
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.
Stabbed her father with a knife
Took her mother’s happy life
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 wheelchair, 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.
“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead
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.
Review:
Riley Sager has quickly become an author whose books I consider to be a “guilty pleasure”: they’re not exactly the most well-written, but they still entertain me with their attention-grabbing plots and mysteries. The Only One Left is Sager’s latest novel and, while not his best, was still an engaging tale of murder and deceit.
I was drawn to Sager’s newest title by its premise, which offered the kind of mystery - a murder in a rich mansion that spawns a cult following - that best belongs in an Agatha Christie novel. The Only One Left also has a very immersive setting, as Sager surrounds his audience with the spirit of the 1980s, all the way down to the movies playing in the fictional town’s theater.
The Only One Left struggles with its pacing, and its characters can never seem to get out of their own way: the main character, Kit, engages in conversations regarding the murders with the cast of characters at the Hope mansion that are painfully repetitive, offering almost no new information up until the dramatic reveal at the book’s end. This makes the reveal less rewarding and, therefore, less climactic.
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