Opinions of a Wolf

A Gothic chiller about a young caregiver assigned to work for a woman accused of a Lizzie Borden-like massacre decades earlier.

Summary:
Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything.

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, 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.

Review:
I’m from New England so grew up with the Lizzie Borden jump-rope rhyme, and I’m a long-time fan of Riley Sager’s works. So I put myself on the hold list for this at my library as soon as the title was announced. Sager’s works play with thriller tropes. This one is more of a loose play. Ever since the original murders people have debated whether or not she was actually the murderer. So that’s what is at play here – how we treat others when the evidence points toward them but not conclusively enough for a sentencing.

For the majority of the book, I thought I had the murderer figured out, and not too many twists happened. the majority of the twists come in a giant pile right at the end. That said, I was partially right about what I thought from the beginning. I wasn’t 100% there, but I was partially there. I wanted to be slightly more surprised than I was. Although the pile of twists at the end did increase my satisfaction regardless.

The 1983 setting was a little weakly done. It felt more like a plot device to avoid the inconvenience of cell phones and characters texting each other than a true love letter to the 1980s. The 1980s was like sprinkles on top instead of what the story was built upon. I also personally didn’t understand why Kit was so afraid of a bed-bound elderly woman. Even assuming she had committed three murders decades ago. A murderer who has been bed-bound for decades and is now elderly is nothing to be afraid of. So the fear factor was lower for me.

One thing that annoyed me was the murder jump-rope rhyme in the book. The cadence was off, making it impossible to actually chant properly for a jump-rope game. This is easily seen in the first two lines. The Lizzie Borden one is this:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
Gave her mother forty whacks

Each line is precisely 7 syllables long, plus the accents come every other syllable and in both lines the strong syllable comes first.

LIZzie BORden TOOK an AXE
GAVE her MOTHer FORty WHACKS

In contrast, this is the first two lines of the jump-rope rhyme written for this book:

At seventeen Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope

The first line is 8 syllables, and the second one is 7. The second one’s accents work, but the first line’s don’t.

at SEVenTEEN leNORa HOPE
HUNG her SISter WITH a ROPE

It just simply doesn’t work as a jump-rope rhyme because jump-rope rhymes start with a strong syllable, and the lines are the same length as each other. They’re meant for keeping rhythm for the jumpers and the turners. Children on a schoolyard would have changed it to make it work, even if it meant changing a detail to be inaccurate. For example:

SIXteen OLD leNORa HOPE
HUNG her SISter WITH a ROPE

This makes it even more like the Lizzie Borden rhyme, in fact, because that one is slightly inaccurate for the sake of the rhyme scheme. It was Lizzie’s stepmother who was killed, not her mother.

In any case, the rhyme is repeated a lot in the book, and always at least the first line, and it made me cringe every time it came up.

The thriller itself was still quite enjoyable anyway but it would have jumped up to remarkable with this issue fixed and a more thoroughly shocking twist. A fun new read from a popular thriller author.

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4 out of 5 stars

Length: 385 pages – average but on the longer side

Source: Library

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