Book Review: The Only One Left by Riley Sager

Riley Sager may be a pseudonym but his work is anything but indistinguishable. Since making his debut with 2017’s Final Girls, which won the International Thriller Writers (ITW) Award for Best Hardcover Novel and was published in 30 countries, he has been a mainstay on bestsellers and best-of lists due in large part to his high-concept, high-stakes tales featuring dynamic characters, multidimensional settings, and nerve-jangling (and often subtly paranormal) suspense. This June, Sager returns with his seventh standalone offering, The Only One Left.

1983: Thirty-something Kit McDeere is a devoted caregiver whose one mistake—failing to lock up a bottle of fentanyl—led to her last client’s fatal overdose. Suspected of intentional complicity in the woman’s death by the police and maligned in the local media, Kit has also been suspended from her job and shunned by her father, with whom she lives in quiet discontent. After six months, her savings are nearly depleted, and she has failed to secure a new job despite her best efforts. So when her boss offers her an immediate live-in assignment, she has little choice but to accept—even when it means working for accused murderess Lenora Hope.

Long believed to have killed her mother, father, and sister in 1929, Lenora (though never convicted of any crime) has since become the stuff of nursery rhymes:

“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.”

Crippled by a series of strokes, Lenora can no longer speak or move anything but her left arm. She still resides at the aptly named Hope’s End (where blood stains the carpet), an aging mansion that sits on a crumbling cliff’s edge overlooking the water. It is here that Kit—a replacement for the last caregiver, Mary, who disappeared without warning—may learn the full truth of that fateful night. But how much knowing is too much knowing?

Sager creates a memorable pairing in Kit and Lenora, each of whom understands what it’s like to be suspected of causing death(s). They can therefore feel both empathy for, and subtle fear of, the other, not to mention the physical and mental isolation that results. Like Mary before her, Kit discovers that Lenora is (secretly) able to type with assistance and encourages her to do so. But the line between fact and fiction is a dangerous one—and the truth can get you killed. The story alternates between Kit’s first-person narration and Lenora’s typewritten pages, which allows Sager to cleverly juxtapose assumptions with realities, culminating in a series of revelations about the past and present that will change the reader’s understanding of…everything.

The Only One Left is a masterclass in atmospheric suspense from Riley Sager, who continues to flex his creative ingenuity here. While the story is evocative of infamous crimes like the Lizzie Borden axe murders, it’s still very much its own thing—and one in which no detail can be taken for granted. While the twists are both plentiful and plausible, only in hindsight can one appreciate just how intricately and ingeniously plotted the book really is. Much like Hope’s End itself, Sager will have you on the edge right up until the very end.