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The Only One Left — Riley Sager's Brilliant Twist and Fatal Mistake · The Book Brief Project

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: In the summer of 1892, in a mill town in Massachusetts,
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: someone took a hatchet to a wealthy old man and
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: his wife on a hot morning inside their own house.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: His daughter was a 32-year-old Sunday school teacher named Lizzie Borden.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: She was tried for it the following year, and the
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: jury needed about 90 minutes to acquit her. The verdict
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: did not hold. Something smaller held instead, a skipping rhyme.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: the one about 40 whacks, which children were chanting within
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: a few years and which most Americans can still finish
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: for you. Its arithmetic is wrong in both lines. The
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: real count came to well under half of what the
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  Speaker 1: rhyme claims, and the father, who gets the bigger number
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: in the song, took the smaller one. So a court
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: said one thing and a playground said another, and the
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  Speaker 1: playground has been winning for more than a century. Ask
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  Speaker 1: people who know the rhyme what happened at the trial,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: and plenty of them will guess she was convicted. That
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: gap between what was decided and what was sung sits
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: quietly under a novel from the summer of 2023, and
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: the novel never once stops to explain it. Which leaves
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  Speaker 1: a question worth carrying for the next quarter of an hour.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: If a rhyme can outlive a verdict, what would it
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  Speaker 1: take to undo one, and who would be allowed to try?
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: The novel moves everything north to a cliff on the
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  Speaker 1: coast of Maine and trades the hatchet for a rope
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: and a knife. It is Riley Sager's The Only One Left.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Its rhyme has a different name in it, and that
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  Speaker 1: name has had 54 years to harden. The town's version opens,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: in Sager's words, at 17, Lenora Hope hung her sister
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: with a rope. From there, it moves on to the
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  Speaker 1: father with a knife and the mother last of all.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: The year was 1929. The house was called Hope's End.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: The kind of name a family with money gives a
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: place before anyone has had the chance to make a
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  Speaker 1: joke of it. Lenora was never charged. She never left
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: the house again either. Riley Sager is the pen name
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: of Todd Ritter, a former journalist and editor. He published
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: mysteries under his own name before he started over with
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  Speaker 1: a new one, and the new name went on to
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: sell far more than the old one ever did. Keep
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: that small fact somewhere at the back of your mind.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: It has more to do with this book than it
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: seems to. The story itself opens in 1983. Kit McDeer
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: is a home health aide coming back from a six-month suspension.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Her last patient was her own mother, dying of stomach cancer.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: who died of a fentanyl overdose from a bottle Kit
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: had left within reach. Nobody charged Kit with anything. Nobody
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  Speaker 1: cleared her either. The detective on the case still watches
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: her like someone he plans to catch later, and her father,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: who lives in the same house, has more or less
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  Speaker 1: stopped speaking to her. The agency has exactly one job
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  Speaker 1: it is willing to give her. Lenora Hope is in
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: her 70s now. A series of strokes has left her
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  Speaker 1: mute and nearly paralyzed, with movement in one hand and
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: almost nothing else. Her previous nurse walked out in the
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: middle of the night and left her belongings behind. Kit
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: takes the job because she has run out of other
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: ways to pay for her life. Hope's end is falling,
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  Speaker 1: and Sager means that literally. The cliff under it is eroding.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: The floors tilt toward the water. and a crack through
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: the walls widens as the book goes on. There is
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: a housekeeper who runs the place on rules nobody explains,
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  Speaker 1: a cook who has been there forever, a young maid
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  Speaker 1: who talks too much, a handsome groundskeeper. Sager is fluent
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  Speaker 1: in this furniture. He knows you have seen the cliffside
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: mansion before, and he doesn't pretend you haven't. What he
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  Speaker 1: adds is a typewriter. Lenora can press keys with her
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: working hand slowly, one letter at a time. One night,
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  Speaker 1: with Kit feeding the paper, she taps out a sentence
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: that turns the job into something else. In her words,
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  Speaker 1: I want to tell you everything. So the novel splits
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: in two. In the present, Kit sits at the bedside
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: while a woman the whole town believes is a murderer
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  Speaker 1: spells out her life. In the typed pages we get 1929,
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  Speaker 1: a cold house with two sisters in it. Their father
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  Speaker 1: sets them against each other for sport. Their mother is
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  Speaker 1: sinking into laudanum, and one of the girls falls for
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  Speaker 1: a seasonal worker from town, which ends the way it
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  Speaker 1: usually did in houses like that. With a pregnancy, the
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  Speaker 1: family treats as an act of war. The arrangement is
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: cleverer than it looks. Kit is under suspicion because she
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  Speaker 1: had her hands on a dying body. Now her hands
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  Speaker 1: are the only way another suspected woman can speak. Every
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  Speaker 1: page that comes out of that typewriter passes through the
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  Speaker 1: fingers of someone the town also refuses to trust, and
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  Speaker 1: Sager builds the whole testimony on two women nobody believes,
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  Speaker 1: then asks you to believe it. Kit needs Lenora to
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  Speaker 1: be innocent, and the need has very little to do
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  Speaker 1: with curiosity. If a woman can be called a killer
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  Speaker 1: for half a century and turn out to be innocent,
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  Speaker 1: then maybe the same is true of a home health
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  Speaker 1: aide from a small town in Maine. Lenora's innocence would
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: be a precedent, and Kit is desperate for one. This
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: part of the book has a long shadow behind it.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: In 1962, Shirley Jackson published We Have Always Lived in
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  Speaker 1: the Castle about two sisters and an elderly uncle left
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  Speaker 1: in a big house after most of their family died
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: from arsenic in the sugar bowl. The older sister was
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  Speaker 1: tried and acquitted. The village children chant a rhyme about
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  Speaker 1: it anyway, and the younger sister, the one telling you
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  Speaker 1: the story, turns out to be the poisoner. Jackson uses
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  Speaker 1: the rhyme to show you the village, its appetite, its pleasure,
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  Speaker 1: and a cruelty it can sing. Sager uses his rhyme
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  Speaker 1: to keep your eyes off the house. From here on,
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  Speaker 1: I am going to talk about the ending, all of it.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: because the argument I want to make sits inside the
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  Speaker 1: twists and nowhere else. If you have not read the
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  Speaker 1: book and you mean to, stop here, read it, and
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: come back. It moves fast. It won't take you long.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: The present-day plot tightens the way you expect it to.
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  Speaker 1: The missing nurse turns up on the rocks below the terrace,
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: and the police call it suicide. Kit doesn't believe them.
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  Speaker 1: Sentences start appearing on the typewriter at night that Kit
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  Speaker 1: never took down. The housekeeper's grip on the money looks
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  Speaker 1: less like loyalty every time Kit looks at it, and
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  Speaker 1: more like ownership. And Kit, who has spent six months
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: being told her judgment can't be trusted, starts to wonder
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  Speaker 1: whether the woman in the bed can do far more
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  Speaker 1: than she lets on. So, by the middle of the book,
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  Speaker 1: you are holding two accused women and a typewriter between them.
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  Speaker 1: The book has told you, more or less, what happened
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  Speaker 1: in that house in 1929. It has not told you
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  Speaker 1: who is actually doing the typing. The answer is the
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  Speaker 1: best thing Sager has ever done. The woman in the
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  Speaker 1: bed is Virginia, the sister the rhyme says was hanged.
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  Speaker 1: And the housekeeper, the one with the rules and the
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  Speaker 1: keys and the ledger, is Lenora Hope. Here is the
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: night as the book finally gives it to you. Virginia
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: was the pregnant sister. Their father paid the boy to
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  Speaker 1: disappear and had the baby taken off to Canada with
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: the girl's governess. When their mother learned what he had done,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: she stabbed him. The boy was still in the house,
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  Speaker 1: and on the grand staircase, the mother goaded him until
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  Speaker 1: he killed her. Virginia, alone with all of it, tried
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  Speaker 1: to hang herself and lived. Lenora found her sister with
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  Speaker 1: the rope. and assumed Virginia had done everything. She rearranged
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  Speaker 1: the scene to look like murder. Virginia survived, unable to
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  Speaker 1: move or speak. Some months later, Lenora bribed a doctor
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  Speaker 1: to declare her dead and took the absent governess's name.
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  Speaker 1: Then she spent the family money abroad, while her sister
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  Speaker 1: lay upstairs under the name of the girl the town
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  Speaker 1: had already convicted. Think about what that does to the rhyme.
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  Speaker 1: It accused the wrong sister of the killings. Then, for
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  Speaker 1: half a century, the town's hatred landed on a woman
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  Speaker 1: who was not even the sister it named. The book
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  Speaker 1: has been arguing since its first page that a story
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  Speaker 1: told often enough will convict whoever happens to be standing
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  Speaker 1: inside it, and this twist turns that argument into plot.
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  Speaker 1: Every clue you missed was fair. The housekeeper's grip on
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: the money and the way she hovered whenever Kit was
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  Speaker 1: alone with the patient We're both sitting in plain sight.
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  Speaker 1: And then Sager keeps going. Kit drives home, and her
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  Speaker 1: father is waiting. He is the boy from 1929, the
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  Speaker 1: man on the staircase. He killed the previous nurse because
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  Speaker 1: she had started tracing the bloodline back toward him. And
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: he is the one who helped Kit's mother take the pills,
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  Speaker 1: then let his daughter carry the suspicion for six months.
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  Speaker 1: The trouble with this ending was never the number of twists.
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  Speaker 1: It's this one. The bond between Kit and Lenoro worked
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: because it was a resemblance and nothing more. Two women
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  Speaker 1: with no connection at all, crushed by the same machinery
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  Speaker 1: of rumor, in towns that decide first and ask later.
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  Speaker 1: That is a real idea about how communities behave. Make
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  Speaker 1: the two stories blood relations. and the idea shrinks into
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  Speaker 1: a coincidence. The world of the novel, which felt like
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  Speaker 1: a whole coastline of people ready to believe the worst,
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  Speaker 1: collapses to the size of one family's secret. You can
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: see why he reached for it. A Sager novel is
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: sold on its last 50 pages, and his readers arrive counting.
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  Speaker 1: The way people count fireworks on the 4th of July.
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  Speaker 1: The identity swap was the finale. The father is one
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  Speaker 1: more rocket sent up after the crowd had already started clapping,
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  Speaker 1: and it lands on the one character the book had
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  Speaker 1: kept clean of the Hope family until then. It also
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  Speaker 1: changes how Kit gets free. Nobody comes to believe her.
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  Speaker 1: No new evidence turns up. Her father confesses at the
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: edge of a failing cliff, and that admission is what
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  Speaker 1: clears her name. The novel spends 400 pages on women
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: convicted by talk. And when it finally releases one of them,
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: it does it with a man's confession. Maybe Sager is
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: simply being honest about how the world works. Maybe the
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  Speaker 1: book could not picture a woman cleared by being believed.
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  Speaker 1: I go back and forth on which, and I am
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  Speaker 1: not sure the book knows either. Then the cliff gives way.
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  Speaker 1: Kit gets Virginia out. Lenora and Kit's father walk back
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  Speaker 1: inside together, and hope's end slides into the sea. about
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  Speaker 1: as close to the fall of the House of Usher
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  Speaker 1: as an American thriller is likely to get, there is
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  Speaker 1: one more turn, and it buys back some of what
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  Speaker 1: the father cost. Virginia comes to life with Kit, and
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  Speaker 1: a few months later, she is simply gone. A letter arrives.
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  Speaker 1: She got her body back four months after the rope.
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  Speaker 1: She kept performing this stillness for more than 50 years,
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  Speaker 1: partly out of fear, and partly, it seems, to keep
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  Speaker 1: her sister chained to that house as surely as she was.
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  Speaker 1: The woman who pecked out sentences with one finger could
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  Speaker 1: have typed with both hands the whole time. She leaves
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: for Paris with the young maid, who turns out to
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: be her granddaughter, and she sends two tickets, one for Kit,
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: and one for the old cook. The last page of
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: the book is her obituary. She lived to 101. That
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  Speaker 1: twist I will defend. It strains belief, and it hardly matters,
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: because it hands the story back to the woman it
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  Speaker 1: belongs to. For most of the novel, Virginia's voice arrives
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: through someone else's hands. By the end, she is the
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: author of the whole arrangement, the silence included. The rhyme
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: had her hanged at 17. She outlived her sister in
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  Speaker 1: the house and very nearly everyone who ever sang that rhyme.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: If you like your books taken one at a time
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: and argued without loud, follow The Book Brief Project. There
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: is another one already open on the desk. In Fall River,
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  Speaker 1: the rhyme beat the jury, and it is still winning.
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  Speaker 1: Sager understands that better than almost anyone working in his genre.
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  Speaker 1: And for most of this book, he uses it beautifully.
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  Speaker 1: He corrects every name in his rhyme. The sister in
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: the bed gets her own name back, and so, for
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  Speaker 1: one last chapter, does the woman who stole it. Then,
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  Speaker 1: at the last minute, he writes Kit into a smaller one,
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  Speaker 1: with her father standing in the middle of it. One
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  Speaker 1: twist fewer, and this would be the best book he
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: has written.