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The Only One Left

The Only One Left

ThrillerGothic
Pages
400
Published
2023
Language
English

Synopsis

In 1983, home health aide Kit McDeere is sent to Hope's End, a decaying mansion perched on the eroding cliffs of the Maine coast. Her new patient is Lenora Hope, an elderly woman who is mute, confined to a wheelchair, and infamous: in 1929, when she was seventeen, her entire family was murdered at Hope's End, and although the police were never able to prove she did it, the rumour has followed her for more than fifty years.

Unable to speak, Lenora communicates by tapping out words on an old typewriter, and one night she offers to tell Kit exactly what happened. As her typed account of 1929 unspools alongside Kit's own days in the house, the details begin to contradict one another — and Kit, who came to Hope's End carrying a disgrace of her own, grows steadily less certain that anyone there can be trusted, least of all the woman she was hired to care for.

Riley Sager's Gothic thriller braids 1929 and 1983 into a twisting mystery about guilt, memory, inheritance, and the stories people tell in order to survive them.

Prose complexity
4/10

Vibe

MysteriousTenseDarkAtmospheric
Dual TimelineUnreliable NarratorMystery Box

Genres

Thriller Gothic Mystery Psychological Thriller Horror

About the author

R
Riley Sager

Riley Sager is the pen name of Todd Ritter, an American author of psychological thrillers. He grew up in Pennsylvania and worked as a journalist, editor and graphic designer before writing full time. He adopted the Sager pseudonym for Final Girls (2017), which won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Hardcover Novel. His later thrillers include The Last Time I Lied, Lock Every Door, Home Before Dark, Survive the Night, The House Across the Lake, The Only One Left, Middle of the Nigh...

Characters

Kit McDeereProtagonist

A home health aide, newly disgraced, hired in 1983 to care for a woman suspected of murdering her family decades earlier.

Lenora HopeSupporting

A mute, wheelchair-bound woman infamous since 1929 for the unsolved murder of her family at Hope's End; she tells her version by typewriter.

All characters in The Only One Left

Frequently asked questions

  • Is The Only One Left part of a series?

    No — it is a standalone novel, and you can read it without having read anything else by Riley Sager. His publisher lists no series for it. It appeared between The House Across the Lake (2022) and Middle of the Night (2024), but those are simply the books either side of it in his bibliography: they share no characters, no setting and no continuing storyline.

  • When and where is The Only One Left set?

    On the Maine coast, across two timelines. The present-day strand is 1983, when home health aide Kit McDeere arrives at Hope's End to care for Lenora Hope. The second strand is 1929, the year Lenora's family was murdered at the house, which she recounts by typing it out a page at a time. The chapters alternate between the two.

  • Is The Only One Left based on a true story?

    No. Hope's End, the Hope family and the 1929 murders are all invented. The setup does deliberately echo the Lizzie Borden case — the publisher's own jacket copy describes it as a "Lizzie Borden-like massacre", with a young woman suspected of killing her family and never proven guilty — but the novel is fiction and is not a retelling of that case.

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