With a Vengeance by Riley Sager
Read by Erin Bennett
Published: June 2025
Summary from Goodreads:
10 hours, 40 minutes
One train. No stops. A deadly game of survival and revenge.
In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family. Twelve years later, she’s ready for retribution.
Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall onto a luxury train from Philadelphia to Chicago, an overnight journey of thirteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.
But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.
With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in their midst while protecting the people she hates the most. In order to destroy her enemies, she must first save them—even though it means putting her own life at risk.
Confession:
While I more or less liked this story, I did find it a bit boring and predictable. I also found the characters to be a bit surface level, especially the villains, and never felt any kind of emotional connection. The story was also slow moving and I had a lot of issues with the main female character, Anna, the one who set this whole train in motion.
The narrator, Erin Bennett, does a good job with the story. She has a nice voice and does a good job with making all of the characters sound like individuals. But this is a story that could have benefitted from more than one reader. I often lost whose point of view we were hearing from as they switched often. But I would definitely give Ms Bennett another listen on another book especially if it is a book that is told from a single perspective.
The book started off kind of weak as we got a lot of information just dumped on us. Each character has a chapter at the start that explained their role in the train disaster 12 years ago. All of that information at once, made it kind of hard to keep track of who was who. Once that was over with and the characters were brought together it was a bit better going. Although I did have issue with how predictable the whole story was. I kind of knew who was committing the murders from the start. There was a surprise twist at the end, which did surprise me, but it also sort of didn’t fit with the overall story.
My biggest issue with revenge stories is they tend to be over the top. This one wasn’t any different, except for Anna’s reason for bringing them all together. She states many time that she didn’t want to kill them, but then why this whole game with the train trip? Her motive just didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t make sense to the other character’s either as they all kept pointing out to her. I did like Anna and felt she was pretty smart in how she figures out who the murderer is, but everyone’s death was on her head in my opinion.
I did like the setting of the train and how the story was set up as each chapter being an hour of the trip. The writing was also well done and except for the slow info dump at the start it moved at a pretty good pace. The ending was also pretty well done and felt satisfying to me as well.
Not my favorite by this author, but it was still an ok read. If you’re a fan of this author’s work than you should give this one a try. If you like thrillers though and have never read his work before, I would suggest starting with one of his other books.
Confessions of a Serial Reader 