The Only One Left

Riley Sager, the best-selling novelist, makes a comeback with a Gothic horror tale about a young caretaker hired to work for a lady suspected of committing a slaughter akin to that of Lizzie Borden decades before.

Lenora Hope hung her sister with a rope when she was seventeen.

The murders of the Hope family, which horrified the Maine coast one horrific night in 1929, have now been reduced to a playground song. Lenora, who is seventeen years old, is thought to be the culprit, although the authorities were never able to establish this. She has never discussed the night in public or left Hope's End, the cliffside estate where the slaughter took place, except from her denial after the deaths.

stuck a knife in her father.

took the contented life of her mom.

Now, in 1983, Lenora's previous nurse ran away in the middle of the night, and Kit McDeere, a home health aide, arrives at a dilapidated Hope's End to take care of her. Lenora, who is in her sixties and confined to a wheelchair, had a series of strokes that left her silent. She can only type phrases on an outdated typewriter to communicate with Kit. Lenora uses it one evening to make a seductive offer: "I want to tell you everything."

It was not me, Lenora said.

But only she is still alive.

It becomes evident that there is more to the story than most people are aware of when Kit assists Lenora in writing about the occasions leading up to the Hope family killing. However, Kit begins to worry that Lenora may not be revealing the whole truth and that the apparently innocuous lady in her care could be considerably more dangerous than she first believed when additional information about her predecessor's departure becomes available.