The Only One Left Review

*SOME SPOILERS*

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. 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.

Kit was an interesting main character for sure. She definitely intrigued me straight off the bat, knowing she was on forcible leave after she was involved in an incident at work and caring for Lenora was her only option. It gave her some depth to her character and made me invested in finding out what she did.

Lenora and her story was definitely the most captivating plotline though and the way she told it through the typewriter really dragged out the suspense. However, I just think it dragged a little too long in the middle of the book. The first half when we’re finding everything out is kind of a whirlwind and then the ending is just twist after twist that it’s almost kind of hard to keep up. So the pacing was a little off but I was soo invested and was theorizing in my head who killed the Hope family and what happened that night that it was easy to overlook.

This got a little ridiculous and over the top but it’s something that I’ve come to expect from Riley Sager’s books so I just myself along for the ride. I loved the setting of the decaying manor perched in a cliff I felt it just added to that overall tone of uneasiness and build up of anticipation. Its once of those mystery/thrillers where you have to suspend a lot of your belief and enjoy the twists and turns that just kept coming and coming!

⭐️4/5 stars So OTT that it was actually quite fun!