Teres's Reviews > The Only One Left

It’s best to approach Riley Sager’s latest release, The Only One Left, knowing as little as possible. To that end, allow me to fill you in…

This is a gothic whodunit set in 1983, where we meet Kit McDeere, a home-health aide providing live-in assistance to recluse Lenora Hope who’s confined to a wheelchair and, thanks to a stroke, able to use only her left hand to communicate.

Lenora was accused, though never convicted, of murdering her wealthy Maine family decades earlier in a Lizzie Borden-like massacre.

Now the subject of a playground rhyme — At 17, 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 — Lenora has never spoken publicly about the murders nor has she been seen outside her family home since that night in 1929.

Caregiver Kit hasn’t worked since being suspended without pay six months earlier for failing to lock up a bottle of fentanyl that led to her last client’s fatal overdose. 

Oh, I should also mention that Lenora’s last nurse up and left without any notice… in the middle of the night. Eeek.

Like all good gothic thrillers, the story's location is a character itself. The crumbling cliffside mansion, Hope’s End, teeters on the edge of the Atlantic. Sager provides vivid and haunting descriptions of the seaside home with its cracking walls, steadily tilting floors, shadowy doorways, footsteps at night, and blurry figures in windows.

The novel moves between Kit’s first-person narration in the present and Lenora’s typewritten account of her life leading up to the incident.

If you’re looking for twists, turns, and buried secrets, this story offers them in spades.

Much like Hope’s End itself, Sager will have you on the edge right up until the very last page.