At seventeen, Lenora Hope

Hung her sister with a rope

Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, 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.

Stabbed her father with a knife

Took her mother’s happy life

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.

“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said

But she’s the only one not dead

As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.

The rocky Maine shoreline. A crumbling old manor filled with antiques. Decades’ worth of family secrets and lies. Add in a sprinkle of murder, and you’ve got the recipe for another perfect summer thriller from Riley Sager.

Kit McDeere arrives at Hope’s End, a mansion shrouded in secrets and rumors, as an unenthusiastic caretaker for elderly Lenora Hope. Lenora, who spends her days sitting silently in her wheelchair, only communicates with Kit through a typewriter. She is infamous in her small coastal town, which believes that she murdered her whole family decades prior. Soon Lenora, starts writing messages that refer to her family’s murderous past, and Kit can’t help but try to piece together the clues Lenora is leaving her. Even if everyone else at Hope’s End is against her and her own past haunts her every move . . . Kit has to find the truth.

The Only One Left explores what happens when you take a house ripe for ghost stories and add two complicated women with plenty of skeletons in their pasts. Each suspicious character and typed message will have you on the edge of your seat—or beach blanket. This is a summer thrill-ride you won’t want to miss.