With a Vengeance

by Riley Sager

Thriller

Mystery

Suspense

383 Pages

"Riley Sager has done it again—With a Vengeance is a propulsive, twisty thriller that had me racing through pages until dawn."

Synopsis

In 1942, six people conspired to destroy Anna Matheson's family. Twelve years later, in 1954, Anna is ready to make them pay. She's carefully orchestrated a trap: under false pretenses, she's lured all six onto a luxury overnight train traveling from Philadelphia to Chicago—fourteen hours with no stops and no escape. Her plan is elegant and just: confront each person with their crimes, extract confessions, and deliver them to authorities waiting at Union Station. After years of planning, justice will finally be served. But when one of her targets is found murdered in their compartment, Anna's carefully constructed revenge plot collapses into chaos. Someone else on board is executing their own deadly agenda, and they won't stop until everyone is dead. As the train hurtles through the darkness toward Chicago, Anna faces an impossible dilemma: to achieve her revenge, she must first save the very people she's spent twelve years learning to hate. With each passing hour bringing them closer to their destination and each passenger potentially the next victim—or the killer—Anna must hunt a murderer while protecting her enemies. The clock is ticking, the train isn't stopping, and discovering the truth may cost Anna everything, including her life.

Our Take

Riley Sager, master of the propulsive page-turner, delivers his most ingeniously plotted thriller yet with With a Vengeance. The setup is irresistible: Murder on the Orient Express meets Gone Girl, with a protagonist whose elaborate revenge scheme becomes infinitely more complicated when someone starts killing her targets before she can expose them. What makes this work so brilliantly is the moral complexity Sager brings to Anna's character—we root for her quest for justice while questioning whether revenge can ever truly satisfy. The 1954 setting adds rich atmospheric detail and clever plotting possibilities in an era before cell phones and instant communication, when a speeding train truly becomes an isolated murder scene. Sager's pacing is relentless; each chapter ratchets up the tension as the body count rises and suspicions shift among the confined passengers. The dual mystery structure—who destroyed Anna's family in 1942, and who's killing them now—creates delicious tension that pays off with genuinely shocking revelations. This is Sager at his best: smart, twisty, and impossible to put down. Fans of The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware or The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton will devour this in one breathless sitting. It's a thriller that satisfies on every level—clever premise, breakneck pacing, complex protagonist, and twists that genuinely surprise.