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, 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.

Book Type:

Psychological Thriller

Review: The Only One Left

A caregiver digs into a past murder when she’s assigned to the town’s own “Lizzie Borden.”

At seventeen, 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

Following her own controversy, home-health aide Kit McDeere is relegated to a job others have refused—to care for Lenora Hope, who in 1929 was accused of murdering her entire family. Lenora needs constant care after her stroke, which has left her unable to speak. Kit moves in to the notorious, now crumbling estate—Hope’s End—which sits atop a cliff off the coast of Maine.

Curiosity over what transpired consumes Kit, especially as Lenora and she begin to communicate via an old typewriter. Her time at Hope’s End takes an inescapable turn one night when Lenora offers, “I want to tell you everything.”

Sager masterfully builds a sinister, gothic atmosphere with both characters and setting. Ratcheting tension and a clamoring curiosity drive the narrative, while a bevy of intricate (arguably too many) twists shape the last quarter of the novel.

The vibe of the book is akin to Sager’s HOME BEFORE DARK (which I loved)—the derelict house of horrors dripping with decades-old secrets of murder, greed, envy, and forbidden romance. Parallels between past and present intensify stakes as the past rouses to life by the story’s jaw-dropping climax.

Dark, deliciously gothic, and dripping with drama, I couldn’t put it down.

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