After Kit McDeere is accused (but not charged) with assisting her cancer-stricken mother to die, her only option for a job is to become caregiver to Lenora Hope, a woman who is suspected of having murdered her parents and sister when she was a teenager.

As the result of a stroke, Lenora is paralyzed, having only limited use of her left hand. Her previous caregiver has disappeared without a trace. The woman lives with a small loyal staff in a crumbling mansion perched on the edge of a cliff over the sea.

Lenora is unable to speak. But, with Kit's help, she is able to communicate by typing, and she reveals a desire to tell her caregiver what happened on that night long ago when her family was murdered. Kit begins to bond with her patient and suspects she may not be the monster depicted by history.

Kit soon realizes someone might not want the truth revealed, and suspects abound as to who might be desperate to keep Lenora from telling her story. Even the decrepit house, leaning ever close to pitching itself and its residents into the sea, becomes an impediment to revelation.

I confess, I've always had a predilection for gothic fiction. I cut my reading eyeteeth on Poe, the Brontes, Robert Louis Stevenson and company. This novel by Riley Sager has all the earmarks of the best of the genre -- fear, the hovering threat of supernatural elements, mysterious buildings and the past haunting the present. Sager has brought all these elements to bear in this novel.

Admittedly, the novel has flaws (what novel doesn't?). Still, it's one of those novels you don't want to put down -- a page-turner of a thriller with more twists and turns than a country road. Some novels have unreliable narrators. In this one, everyone who speaks is unreliable.

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