With a Vengeance by Riley Sager

 This locked room mystery runs off the rails.

The  year is 1954 and Anna Matheson has invited six people on a luxury express train journey to Chicago. These are the people who destroyed Anna's family and ruined her life 12 years ago. She has collected her evidence and now wants vengeance; Anna has a plan. Her scheme goes awry shortly into the journey, and from then on, tables are turned and nothing goes according to her agenda. 

Although the premise sounded good, it was flawed from the beginning as there seemed no reason to host this train journey. But I love trains and so I picked this up expecting something quite different to how it all turned out. I totally understood Anna's reasons for wanting revenge, but the execution of exacting that just seemed like a waste of time, effort, and money. Since all went to heck quite quickly, it became obvious that her method of obtaining validation and causing the perpetrators of the events that brought down the Matheson family to suffer didn't come to fruition. 

All the characters with their history and misdeeds was repetitive. Her moments with each alone didn't really get Anna what she was wanting and sometimes it seemed like all she did was move up and down the train endlessly. I would have loved lot more info about the train and less about the people. The appearance of one unexpected character was first one thing and then abruptly quite another and it was a huge plot hole. All the attempts at making this twisty -- who was the killer -- also went on far too long. In short, the story bogged itself down and got mired in its own attempt to deliver shocks and surprises. When Anna steps out onto the roof of the speeding train in a snowstorm, I lost interest as it led to that ridiculous ending. I surely hope there are no sequels planned.

I have been hit and miss with Sager for awhile. He used to be an automatic want to read but now I need to be more judicious. I appreciated the effort in setting the book in a time period without technology so there was no magic hacker ah ha moments, etc. but overall, it just didn't work for me.


I was able to listen to the audio book while also following along in the e-book ARC provided by the publisher. The narrator, Erin Bennett, did a good job voicing the characters and her performance definitely enhanced the story and gave a bit of dramatic flair despite the drawbacks noted above.

This is a standalone and is not part of any series.

Genre and tags - locked room mystery, luxury train, 1954, WWII, murder, revenge