Sydney Books's Reviews > The Only One Left

Yessss i loved this book!!

Me too! Great book club pick!

Just started this! Love it so far!

Finished it today and loved it!!

Just started yesterday

I have like 10 pages left and I am unwell 😂😂😂

There were quite a few twists there at the end, but I cannot say I didn't thoroughly enjoy them all--especially the last one! Loved it!

Hi, great review ! I was wondering, is this story set in fall ? I have to read a book set in autumn season for a reading challenge but I'm struggling to find one.

Just finished this today, it was awesome !!

Great review, Sydney!

I’m on the last ten pages, Whip lash is correct! Holy crap balls!

Whip lash is literally the only way to describe that ending

The area called The Cliffs, on the Maine Coast, was “home to the cream of the crop, perched over everyone and everything, as if God himself had placed them there,” and “Hope’s End eclipse[d] those stately mansions. It was bigger, grander.” “Three stories tall and seemingly as wide as a cruise ship, the mansion “was a marvel of Gilded Age excess.” Hope’s End was also the place where a bloodbath occurred fifty-four years earlier one night, in 1929. Winston, Evangeline, and Virginia Hope lost their lives there, and Lenora Hope, the surviving sister, was suspected of being the murderer.
Kittredge, or Kit, 31, had twelve years of working experience as a trained caregiver when she was assigned to take care of Lenora Hope, 71. She was nevertheless intimidated, the more so because her predecessor Mary, who had been at Hope’s End more than a year, had mysteriously left in the middle of the night.
Two unsolved enigmas within fifty-four years of each other.
Kit was briefed on her arrival on her charge’s condition by Mrs.Baker, the housekeeper, about the same age as Lenora. “She’d been plagued by bad health most of her life. A bout of polio in her twenties weakened her legs so much she’s been unable to walk since. Over the past twenty years, she’s suffered a series of strokes. They left her unable to speak and the left side of her body paralyzed.”
In due time, Kit found out that what she was told was a pack of lies. The woman who was her charge was not Lenora but her sister Virginia, and her pitiful condition was not due to bad health or strokes but her own fault: she had tried to kill herself on that fateful night out of utmost despair. She was betrayed by her secret fiancé, Rick, her parents’ housekeeper, who renounced her and their newborn baby in exchange for her father’s money, and lost her child, who was taken away from her by Mrs. Baker on her father’s order. She failed her suicide because “the noose around her neck was not much of a noose at all,” but “the hanging had damaged her larynx, leaving her unable to speak, and snapped her spinal cord, leaving her mostly paralyzed.”
Lenora never killed anyone. All she did when she saw the hanging was rescue her sister, but she left her for dead when she thought she had failed. That was why she was suspected of killing Virginia, but she was never proved guilty.
When things calmed down, however, she asked Virginia to impersonate her - a strange and reckless request considering she was able-bodied while her sister was mute and paralyzed. But Virginia acquiesced, no doubt because she could not do otherwise. Not only that, Lenora herself impersonated Mrs.Baker - she knew the former housekeeper had vanished and was unlikely to re-emerge. An inventive sleight of hand since Lenora’s sister was thought to have died.
Even though Kit only solved part of the old enigma, she was a lot more successful with the one regarding Mary’s disappearance: Mary lost her life while trying to help Virginia track down her child’s father, kille by Rick. Kit’s discovery, however, was her own utmost downfall, since the man Mary tracked down, to Kit’s stunned bewilderment, appeared to be none other than her own father, who had been the Hopes’ s groundskeeper in 1929, under a name unknown to her.
But only the sisters knew what happened on that fateful night in 1929. Evangeline killed her husband to punish him for what he did to Virginia, and was killed by Rick at her request.
The same Rick stealthily entered Hope’s End when he was tracked down by Mary, and was trying to kill Virginia when part of the decaying mansion collapsed and killed him in the process.
The Only One Left - a novel cum extravaganza?