Have You Read This One?

The next book I picked up in my challenge to read what my friends are reading is The Only One Left. This is a book that also has been in the voting round for the university book circle without being picked, making it a double check for challenges. This is a book that I’ve seen everywhere and originally not something I would’ve picked up on my own.

The Only One Left – Riley Sager
Swedish title: Hon som blev kvar
Original publication year: 2023

Elevator pitch synopsis: Kit goes to work at a mansion on a cliff as a home-health aide, a house where a massacre took place and the one who the legends says did it? Her new patient who is now offering to tell her everything.

The story is a little slow in the beginning. The author begins with teasers of the stories but it takes a while before we actually start to take part of them, those were more interesting that the main characters timeline.

The first half of the book, I checked in on Pagebound and read other people’s thoughts and theories. There were many different theories and it felt a little like being in a book circle read-along, to see if they could guess the ending. For the second half, I read it with only myself and to see where the story went without anyone else’s theories.

I liked this book. I didn’t find the interactions among the people living in the house so believable. The main character for one, asking all of these questions and people in most cases just answering. One example of this is the guy at the police, is he allowed to just tell here all of these things? I get that he kind of knew her and felt bad for her situation but it felt like he said things he really shouldn’t.

I have some thoughts on things that would spoil the plot line a bit so I won’t go into that here, but I can say that I appreciated that we got many answers. There were many things I thought would be left hanging but got nicely tied together, even things I kind of had forgotten were loose threads. This is something I’ve seen people complain about, “everything going too neatly together” but in a book like this, it’s what I want. I want answers to all the hints and clues and weird behaviour left along the story. Often we are left with several things that could explain the mystery and if it isn’t one of them, then I want to know why they were acting strange or in that certain way.

I don’t read a lot of thrillers. I had heard that there would be lots of twists in this one. I didn’t actively try to figure out the mystery, I let it take me where it went. I did enjoy it but it was a little slow at times and the way they behaved felt more fore the story than trying to be believable. It did leave me a bit interested to pick up other thrillers though.

I gave this book 3 stars – I liked it.

This book was read by my book circle friend S, someone who reads more thrillers and horror than I do. S rated it 3 stars and I ended up giving it the same.

We are now two people who has read this from the “Books that didn’t get chosen list” with an average rating of 3. The chosen book The Names by Florence Knapp got an average by 3.63, not the same amount of people who have read it though but it got a higher average. That would point to the right book getting picked out of these two, but I very much preferred this one.