Only One Left

A Novel

English language

Published 2024 by Thorndike Press.

ISBN:
978-1-4205-1516-9
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(1 review)

Bestselling author Riley Sager returns with a Gothic chiller about a young caregiver assigned to work for a woman accused of a Lizzie Borden-like massacre decades earlier.

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, …

9 editions

reviewed The Only One Left by Riley Sager

Perfect trash

I've compared The Only One Left to a mashup between We've Always Lived In The Castle and Saint Maud but those are works of art and this is pageturner trash without merits beyond being a tense gothic read. But it's a perfect tense gothic read. Great characters, every chapter has a revelation or clue, the milieu is awesome, there's nothing superfluous, just every puzzle piece perfectly assembled, and it's simultaneously a Gothic classic and a by-the-book golden age whodunnit cozy.

The 1985 setting is perfect in how it's no tech, it's still creaky old stairs and typewriters; no Memphis Design in sight; this is 1985 as a bridge to 1929. Loved it. Maybe I ought to dock it a point because of the "when you reread it some things don't make sense" flaw. So maybe some of the jigsaw pieces were a li'l forced. But I don't care. It was …