It’s 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for her latest patient, Lenora, after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to the bed, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter and answering simple Yes or No questions. One night, Lenora types out a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything, referring to the gruesome deaths of her family of which she was accused of but acquited due to lack of evidence.

“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead

As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light (and a dead body is discovered at the bottom of the hill), Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.

But Hope’s End isn’t a home. It’s a cage built of secrets.

When I started reading this book, two things are massively obvious – that Kit, the new nurse, has a dark secret in her past, and that the house that Lenora is living in, at the edge of a cliff, will eventually collapse.

What I didn’t expect was how many people would be involved in each secret and how they were all tied together. As it is with a good and cosy mystery – you have a gothic mansion, decades-old murder which went unsolved, a butler and a maid who have been with the house for over 50 years and a new, young, grounds-keeper.

Every single day, there is new evidence that the house has subsided a bit more. Cracks in the walls, broken tiles, slanted floors and rolling items.

And Lenora, the elderly invalid that Kit is taking care of, she seems to be chatty at times (via the typewritter) and silent when the police keeps calling to investigate the dead body that was found at the bottom of the ravine and which was identified in being the former nurse.

Things get complicated when the young and sexy groundkeeper reveals that the thinks he might be related to the old woman – as she was pregnant around the time his father was given away for adoption in the same town.

He might have a reason to want to inherit the house.

The two elder house-staff, the maid and the cook, also seem to believe they will inherit the house once the old lady passes.

And the secret of who-dunnit over 50 years ago still haunts the mansion.

“What would you call her?” I say.
“Manipulative.”
Although Mrs. Baker smacks her lips together, as if savoring the word like it’s the wine in her glass, her tone reveals a different emotion.
Distaste.

Who to believe? What will happen next? All of these are fairly good questions which will remain in the reader’s mind ’till the end.

Book was good. The only thing I didn’t quite like was how the relationship between Kit and her father was depicted. Scantily and you feel like you don’t know enough until the final chapters of the book.