Fun fact: I did not pick up With a Vengeance (2025), the ninth novel by Riley Sager, because I knew it featured an impossible crime. In fact, I’m not even sure it does feature an impossible crime. But it might, and I had a lot of fun with this book, and those two points alone are enough to justify me writing about it.

I was attracted to this book by the simplest and best expedient of all: its plot sounding intriguing. In 1942, six people who knew US railway tycoon Arthur Matheson well conspired to make him appear a Nazi sympathiser, culminating in an act of sabotage that saw him imprisoned, where he was murdered in retaliation for his supposed crimes. Twelve years later, twenty-something Anna Matheson has gathered those six people — well, five of them — onto the train that made her father’s name enviable before it was infamous, and has arranged for ensuing journey, with no other passengers, to run non-stop from Philadelphia to Chicago, where the FBI will be waiting to arrest the conspirators.

Complicated, sure, but simple enough. Until someone on the train starts murdering the others. So…whodoinit?

As elevator pitches go, it’s a good one, and Sager (not a woman, as I had originally thought, but a nom de plume for journalist Todd Ritter) has done a very good job in building on this core premise. For a start, the sense of history moving on — not just post-war, or in Anna being able to put her family’s disgrace behind her, but also technologically (“Interstate highways had spread like ooze across the country, choking a once-pristine landscape with traffic. Meanwhile, the sky is quickly filling with planes. If a major city didn’t yet have an air terminal, it would soon. With options like that, no wonder few people choose to ride by rail.”) — is well captured, though there’s still a lingering sense of how the wounds and horror of war hang over a generation that hasn’t quite managed to reconcile those events:

That’s all war was, really. Masses of innocent, expendable men being tossed into the meat grinder of battle. The key to victory was to lose fewer than your enemy.

It’s true that things develop along fairly safe rails, but inside those limitations Sager does strong work with the pacing out of his revelations: first only five of the intended six people take up Anna’s anonymous invitations, then an accidental additional passenger raises the complexity, and, of course, there’s fun to be had in the concept that all Anna wants to do is get these people to Chicago alive, yet someone seems intent on that not happening and so she must protect the very people who have been her sworn enemies for over a decade. Additionally, with the risk of her vengeance being stolen from her, there’s a sense that Anna — “subsisting only on adrenaline and rage” — isn’t necessarily the morally righteous avenging angel that a less considered thriller writer might make her.

For so long, her entire existence has revolved around retribution. She can’t imagine a future in which that isn’t the case. How sad that is, she realizes. How utterly pathetic that this was her only focus in life.

My preference is for points of view not to jump around too much in a novel, and Sager tells this at times from just about every perspective possible, but at the same time he does a very good job of stirring in doubt once the murders begin. This is absolutely more of a thriller than a novel of detection (some elements are handwaved away in a way that is a little disappointing, the detail nerd in me can’t help but feel), but the way certain revelations are overturned and given new meaning is very pleasing to see, and makes me think that I’ll check out more of Sager’s writing even if it is unlikely to feature on this blog again. I’m a fan of a well-constructed reversal, and Sager packs more than a few in here.

His character notes are good, too, so that you are a little more involved with these people than might otherwise be suspected. I enjoyed little introductions like…

He appears to be in his late twenties and plain in every regard. Sandy hair, brown eyes, a face that would likely pass for handsome in different lighting and under more relaxed circumstances. Everything about him, from his suit to his wingtips, seems to strive for a conventionality that borders on the invisible.

…which, even though it’s telling you nothing about this man, kinda tells you everything at the same time. Many of the people on the train are simply Types who were Bad for Money Reasons, but Sager does well to stir in detail and character enough to keep them distinct, keep them memorable, and help you feel at least something when they get dispatched in showy fashion.

“Seamus is better than you,” Anna says, and Sally can’t argue with that. Most people are.

And so, to murder.

There are, at a push, two murders under consideration as impossible here, one of which — despite occurring in a locked cabin (“[The deadbolt] can only be engaged from inside the room.”) with someone standing outside the door — is disappointing in its resolution if only because it breaks the rules of the narrative itself. When you’re told that the person outside the room heard nothing and yet the killer (rot13 for spoilers) rfpncrq guebhtu gur jvaqbj, it unfortunately contradicts the moment later in the book when (rot13) “jvaq ubjyf” guebhtu nabgure jvaqbj bcrarq ba gur fcrrqvat genva. And he didn’t hear that? Man, The Dead Room (1987) wants a word, wonders if you’re free to go for a drink one evening.

A far stronger claim can be made for a poisoning achieved when no-one went anywhere near the victim, who is drinking a cocktail prepared in a shaker which poured out drinks for three other unaffected people. Sure, you have to accept that the drink-maker (I believe the term today is, sigh, mixologist) didn’t a) put or b) spot poison in the glass, but take it from me that he didn’t and things get interesting. Not only is the notion of why anyone would have poison on them in the first place interesting, but the way it’s achieved — relying on quite a bit of luck, yes — was very pleasing, and arguably seeded within the narrative in a way that allows it. I like it, I think others will, but I’m intrigued to see if you agree with me about its impossible credentials.

Sager deserves credit, too, for including a piece of fair play which arguably hints at the killer’s identity but, I’m pretty sure, most readers will sail past. I mean, it’s not a densely clued as a novel of formal detection would be, but the moment mentioned by Anna in the closing stages is there (I double-checked), even if vaguely stated, and I like that Sager included it. I mean, sure, you have to worry that our protagonist got the idea for her train-based retribution after watching Strangers on a Train (1951), The Narrow Margin (1952), and The Lady Vanishes (1938) — because those all famously went so well — but that’s mere cavilling after a ripping good yarn. An accidental impossible crime discovery this may be, but I had a great time with it.

I shall see you again soon, Mr. Sager.

~