With a Vengeance by Riley Sager
With a Vengeance
by Riley Sager
Mystery | Thriller | Historical
383 Pages
Released June 2025
Rating: ★1/2
Goodreads
Content Warnings
At this point, it’s pretty much become tradition for me to read a Riley Sager book sometime in the thick of summer. And while I was skeptical when I first saw this come out, I was hopeful too. Alas, my hopes were quickly dashed.
Anna is on a mission to carry out justice to the six people that tore apart her family twelve years earlier. She has a plan: Lure them onto a long-distance train from Philadelphia to Chicago where she can force their confessions and then hand them over to the authorities at the end of the trip. Except, her passengers are being picked off one-by-one. Now, as the train hurtles to Chicago, Anna is forced to protect the very people she swore to destroy.
I was hesitant going into this story and rightly so because out of all of Sager’s novels this, undoubtedly, has to be one of the worst.
I don’t even know where to begin. This book feels so unpolished, it honestly feels more like the first draft of a story rather than the final product. I know there is this age old adage that writers should show and not tell and boy does this book tell. Everything is completely spelled out for the reader (and not in a good way). There is no reading-between-the-lines or leaving-up-to-the-imagination and I found that to be pretty jarring, especially for a murder-mystery.
The characters all felt flat and cliche. Anna was a boring protagonist and despite knowing what her family went through, I didn’t really feel her anger towards these people that destroyed her life. It felt..gimicky maybe? Like a surface level who-done-it
This book has no atmosphere. It’s supposed to take place in the 1950s but there is nothing about the story to indicate that time period. Not in the way the characters speak, barely in the description of the setting, there was almost no point to that time period at all. Maybe it was to justify everyone being on a train with no cell phone but other than that, this story could have taken place at any time.
One of the biggest issues I had with this novel was the amount of plot twists Sager tried to throw in this book. Every chapter felt like this weird sort of tongue in cheek twist like Sager was trying to test the reader to pay careful attention to the conversations or actions of the characters. It felt overly gratuitous and made me realize there is definitely an art to a finely placed plot twist (which was sorely lacking in this book).
Beyond the plot twists, this book just doesn’t make sense. At one point Anna explains how she isolated all the characters on the train and it just felt ridiculous. There is a character death that occurs towards the end of the book which felt entirely pointless. There were other situations as well but seeing as I am trying to keep this spoiler free, I will refrain from going into more detail. The ending was also extremely uninteresting.
Overall, I guess I can commend Sager for trying something different. It’s definitely not his usual style of story and I can appreciate an author going out on a limb to try something new. In this case, it just didn’t work out.
If you enjoy murder mysteries and can take them at face value you might like this book. But if you read a lot of thrillers, I think you’ll be just as underwhelmed as I was. Personally, this was not my favorite Sager novel (buuuuut that probably won’t stop me from picking up his next release).