Review of "The Only One Left" by Riley Sager

 

Title: The Only One Left
Author: Riley Sager
Release date: June 20, 2023
Rating: 3.5/5
Publisher: Dutton
Book Summary: 

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.

Review:

The Only One Left takes place in a small town in the 80s where our main character, Kit, has had her left completely up-ended by the accusation that she killed her mother. While she was acquitted of all charges, the lingering accusation weighs on her shoulders. In order to get her job back, she is given a proposition she can't refuse: taking care of the notorious Lenora Hope. 

I read this book with a book club, and it is one of the best book recommendations I've had. It was a difficult read to put down with every page revealing juicier information than the last.

Riley Sager has an incredible way of delivering information using interludes typed by Lenora to deliver the information. It creates a dynamic experience: we're reading the book from Kit's perspective, but also from Lenora's. As Kit helps Lenora type each page, we get more and more information on what happened before and during that fateful night. 

Hope's End felt like another world--like it existed outside of the already existing town. It felt all-encompassing. With every twist, the world felt smaller and smaller. More intertwined and more convoluted.

The only reason why I wouldn't score this above a 3.5 or a 4 is the loose ends that I felt were left toward the end. There was a character whose story didn't feel as complete as the others, while another character was heavily involved but not mentioned again past a certain point.

 

Still, I think it was an incredible read, with an unreliable narrator and an even more unreliable group of characters surrounding her. 

 

Review of "The Ninth Choir" by C. Pascual

 

Title: The Ninth Choir
Author: C. Pascual 
Release date: June 6, 2026
Rating: DNF
Publisher: None listed
Book Summary:

Miriam is a five-hundred-year-old elemental witch who appears to be twenty-six. She has a foul temper, a hardened heart, a dark soul, and 500 years’ worth of secrets stashed away. She believes in angels because she sees them every day going about their jobs. She may also be the most powerful thing walking the Earth. She just doesn’t know it yet.

She has spent much of her existence in service to a creature who could be the devil, if the devil exists. She has feared him since the day he saved her from burning on a pyre.

Only recently has Miriam begun to understand what she actually is.
When Miriam saves Anna, a young woman who believes she is an angel, her world changes.

And someone is trying to kill all the angels on this world.
In a small white cottage on A Street in Saint Augustine Beach, a defrocked priest, a teenage Archangel, Miriam and her sister witches, and a Creator who has managed 101,403 worlds are about to do something that has never been done before. Save the angels.

Some will tell you that there are no such things as angels.
And that might be.

But if there were, they would be exactly like the ones in this story.

The Ninth Choir. Book One of a series.

Review:  
I had a difficult time getting into the story. 

In the first few pages there was a lot of assumption that I, the reader, would understand the character's vocabulary and the governing bodies in her world.

While the world and characters seem like an interesting concept, it's hard to follow the narrative. The author frequently jumps in and out of time periods and character points of view. The writing feels detached, and does a lot of "telling" instead of showing. I'm not sure if this is due to the nature of the overall main character, Ena, being a detached being, but as a reader it was hard to feel attached to any portion of the story of the plight of the character.  

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to review the story.