The Only One Left by Riley Sager
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.
I swear that Riley Sager always gets me with the twists.
Kit was accused of a patient’s death and suspended for six months. Her boss asked her back, but the only assignment she could take was to take care of Lenora Hope in a mansion at the edge of a cliff. Lenora is paralzyed and can’t speak. She can only use her left hand to take out answers and slowly type. Lenora was accused her killing her parents and sister when she was seventeen, but there was never enough evidence to arrest her. She has a handful of loyal workers at her home, but she never leaves. The kids in town still talk about her all these years later. Lenora decides that she’s going to tell Kit the true story of what happened. While this is going on, weird things are happening in the house and a body is found dead. Kit isn’t sure that there’s anyone she can trust.
This was so hard to put down and I read it in a couple sittings. I loved the twists and really enjoyed reading Lenora’s story throughout the book.
I gave this book 5 stars.
Have you read this yet? Do you read a lot of Riley Sager? If so, what is your favorite?
