First, she stabbed her father, as the schoolyard song goes, then she killed her mother before hanging her sister. But she swore she didn’t do it, even though no one else was there.
“The Only One Left” (Dutton, 383 pp., ★★★½ out of four), the latest novel by bestselling author Riley Sager, is a Gothic thriller set in 1983, where we meet home-health aide Kit McDeere, who has been assigned to take care of Lenora Hope, an elderly woman who was accused of murdering her wealthy family decades earlier in a Lizzie Borden-like massacre.
Lenora has never publicly spoken about the murders or been seen since that night in 1929, and now she sits paralyzed, mute in a wheelchair in her family’s massive, crumbling cliffside Maine mansion, Hope’s End.
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Kit is reluctant to take the assignment at Hope’s End and doubts Lenora’s innocence, but she doesn’t feel very welcome at home anymore with a father who is barely speaking to her and few other financial prospects.
As she begins working for Lenora — “Miss Hope,” Lenora’s formidable housekeeper Mrs. Baker coldly reminds her — Kit realizes there’s something not quite right at Hope’s End and that there may be more to the Hope family mystery. And what happened to the caregiver Kit replaced?
With her limited communication and the help of an old typewriter, Lenora says she wants to tell Kit everything.
Kit and Lenora have much in common, after all. Both had sick mothers and withholding fathers. Neither have gotten out much and both have been accused of terrible crimes of which they insist they are innocent.
But the price for these family secrets could be deadly.
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Lenora might want to tell her story, but it seems as if someone wants the past to stay there.
As is often the case with Sager’s novels, trying to predict where the many twists will take you is fun (and maddening), but some of the most interesting parts of the story lie in the people you meet along the way.
The mystery is as tantalizing to us as it is to Kit, but “The Only One Left” is also an exploration of family, of love, of loneliness. It even asks an examination of true-crime obsessiveness and when tales overtake reality.
And Hope’s End is almost a character itself, like something out of a Henry James novel. The setting might be the ‘80s, but think more Netflix’s “Haunting of Bly Manor” than “Stranger Things” for the tone it takes.
This thrilling page-turner is quite the tour. Sager has crafted a world where you can nearly see the rich tapestry it must have once been before being faded by time, dust coating it all, dreams drifting away with the heavy winds that batter Hope’s End’s halls.
