The Only One Left x Riley Sager

People, rotting in hell.

⭐⭐⭐

Thriller

📖 385

I am a sucker for a good thriller, especially this time of year. The timing of reading Riley Sager’s The Only One Left worked out exceptionally well for me, as the deaths central to the plot line occurred on Black Tuesday in October 1929, the night the stock market crashed triggering the Great Depression, on the northern Maine coast.

The premise is that fifty-some-odd-years-later, Kittredge (no relation to the American Girl Doll), a caretaker who is recently off suspension after being accused of killing her mother, is hired to care for the only family member who hadn’t been murdered back in 1929; she is mostly paralyzed with limited mobility in her left hand and cannot speak.

The first few chapters had me wondering if the plot was going to go the Rosamund Pike a la I Care a Lot route, or the Tim Curry in Clue route. It also had me wondering why are there so many parallels to the musical The Sound of Music? And why does Sager keep dropping book titles like its one of those free community libraries on a street corner?

The Only One Left is a story with enough tense relationships, lies, betrayls, affairs, and secrets to fill all 36 bedrooms of the mansion it is set in. Sager writes between narrative and typewriter confessional, creating a second point-of-view within the book, and creating a second tier of intrigue. It’s good stuff. Other good stuff Sager does is details, which makes for ripe opportunities to foreshadow and predict what really happened the night of the deaths.

I could easily see this be adapted for film, and being a good one too. Its engaging with details and ideas that help diffrentiate it, with determined, loyal charcters.In all, its a good thriller. I’ve read better, certainly, but not every book is going to be one you finish in one sitting.