Tag Archives: murder

Review: The Only One Left by Riley Sager

22 Friday Dec 2023

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐💫

Riley Sager is the author of seven novels dating back to 2017, but The Only One Left, which was released this summer to lots of fanfare on the book socials, is the first of his books I’ve had the opportunity to read.

This seaside murder mystery has plenty of twists, turns and haunting secrets begging to be exposed. But does it live up to the hype?

Following suspension from her job as an in-home caregiver due to the death of a patient under her care, Kit McDeere gets a chance to redeem herself when she’s offered a posting that no one else will touch: caring for Lenora Hope, the only surviving member of the fabulously wealthy Hope family. The rest of them were murdered one bloody night in 1929. Most of the town thinks Lenora herself is the killer, but she was never convicted. Nor has she ever spoken of what really happened that night. But she’s ready to open up to Kit now. After taking up residence in the crumbling seaside Hope mansion with its skeleton crew of essential servants, Kit becomes absorbed in her quest to uncover the truth about who really murdered the Hope family, and why. Along the way, she’ll discover that Lenora isn’t the only resident of the mansion who’s keeping secrets.

I really wanted to like The Only One Left more than I did. It had a lot to like. A grossly extravagant mansion threatening to crumble into the ocean is a great setting for a murder mystery (I mean, the climax is already built right in). The main character is a disgraced nurse with a haunting secret — BAM, I already want to know more about her. Her patient is a paralyzed heiress who may or may not have murdered her family and gotten away with it — oh my GOD, I want to know everything!! And the estate’s few remaining employees each seem to have their own secrets to conceal, and motives for staying on at the mansion. How is this not going to be the best book I’ve read this year??

What’s not to love here? This concept is absolute money.

For me, though, the execution just wasn’t quite all the way there. Kit as a main character bored the crap out of me — like, her only character traits were father issues and being a nurse — and most of her actions felt plot-driven at the expense of giving her a personality.

And then there were the dramatic reveals. So. Many. Dramatic reveals.

Here’s the thing about dramatic reveals: they’re like shaved truffles. If you use just a little bit in just the right places, they can make your meal/novel into something complex and delicious that you’ll be thinking about long after you’ve finished. But something so powerful can easily overwhelm all the other flavors if you put in too much.

It feels like Riley Sager took a cheese grater to his Dramatic Reveal truffle and shredded the entire thing into his story. They happen practically every single chapter. The frequency of the reveals made this novel feel incredibly soapy, so that by the end I became unable to make myself care about them anymore.

In the end, though, I enjoyed The Only One Left more than I disliked it. The whole aesthetic is great, the mystery is gorgeously compelling, and it’s paced in a way that makes it almost impossible to put down. I think if Sager had put more energy into building great characters and letting them carry the story, rather than constructing a whiplash-inducing plot rollercoaster, this could have been an amazing murder mystery novel. As it is, though, I found it to be just decent.

What did you think of The Only One Left by Riley Sager? Are any of his other books better than this one? Chat with me about it down in the comments, or over on my Instagram!

In The Woods by Tana French

05 Sunday Jul 2009

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In The Woods by Tana French

In The Woods by Tana French

I picked this book up from the best seller table at Borders, because I wanted to take a chance and read something I’d never heard of. The plot sounded interesting. But I’ll be honest. I thought it was going to be your run-of-the-mill murder mystery in which the male and female partner detectives get a once-in-a-lifetime case, run through a bunch of bogus leads, fall in love along the way, find that the unlikely killer was right in front of their face the whole time, and become better people for the whole experience. But In The Woods surprised me.  It wasn’t an altogether pleasant surprise, mind you, but a surprise nonetheless.

Detective Rob Ryan has a hidden past, which all comes rushing back to him when he and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are handed the case of a murdered child in the woods near the Knocknaree estate.  It was in these same woods that Ryan and his two childhood friends went missing.  Ryan was found, clinging to a tree and wearing blood-soaked sneakers, catatonic and unable to remember anything.  The two other children were never found, and the unresolved case files sit collecting dust in the basement of the same building where Ryan now works.  While searching for Katy Devlin’s killer, Ryan struggles to remember what happened to him and his friends that summer, and deals with the fact that finding out may derail his life and his career.

French’s style of writing was easy to get lost in.  Her expertise in conveying emotion and atmosphere made In The Woods a fairly enjoyable read.  An adult who has blotted a traumatic experience from his mind, only to recall it at the most opportune time, is great story fodder.  But it’s not entirely realistic.  French was clearly aware of this, and doesn’t easily give up the answers her readers are looking for.  I applaud her for that.

There were instances during my reading of this book where I thought I knew exactly where it was going.  I would peg a character and say, “Oh, that’s the killer!  How predictable!”  Then French would throw me a curve ball, and I’d be scratching my head, and turning the pages with bated breath to find out where she would go with it next.

Unfortunately, I can’t totally praise this book.  I’ll come right out and say that I hated the narrator, Detective Ryan.  He was an idiot and a hack.  I really enjoy novels where, even if I don’t like the characters, I can at least sympathize with them.  I couldn’t sympathize with Ryan at all.  He came off as fairly smart sometimes, then made completely idiotic, unprofessional decisions.  If he was a real person, I highly doubt he would have gotten any further in his career than mall security cop.

My one other problem with In The Woods was how characters sometimes seemed to act out-of-character for the sake of the plot.  This was glaringly evident to me in the scene where Detective Maddox was trying to coerce a confession out of the killer.  I said to myself, “Come on, this character isn’t that stupid.”  I felt that perhaps French was getting tired of the roundabout investigation and just wanted to speed the ending up.  Fair enough.  It was a pretty long book.

All said and done, I felt that In The Woods left a lot of loose ends that I, as a reader, would like to have seen resolved.  Though those nagging what-ifs are probably what will make the book memorable to me.  Compared to what I was expecting, I’d say that my complaints about In The Woods are pretty minor, and that if you ever have a night to yourself, you should cozy up on your couch and pick up this book.  It’s worth the read.