Archive | Thriller RSS feed for this section

Riley Sager’s Next Stop after With a Vengeance

3 Feb Book cover for “With a Vengeance” by Riley Sager, featuring a dark night scene with a train crossing a tall stone bridge under a cloudy sky lit with red tones; the author’s name appears in large turquoise text.

I preface this blog, knowing that Riley Sager fans probably already read his latest and have their opinions, so if you are one of them consider this more of a look to the future and a return to what, in my opinion, made him a best-selling author. (And it’s coming in 2026).

Riley Sager’s latest, With a Vengeance, is a title in my humble opinion, every writer deserves the right to write once they’ve reached the top of Mount Career Author – a little ‘you’ve earned this’ from their publishing house after they’ve made it clear their ROI is high, and Riley has with such calling card titles as Home Before Dark, The House Across the Lake, Lock Every Door, Final Girls, and The Only One Left. 

During a pre-release chat at Union Square’s Barnes and Noble, Mr. Sager made it clear this was his stab at a ‘whodunit’ Agatha Christie-esque entanglement on a train. With a Vengeance was not a thriller mystery with supernatural elements readers grew to love in the previous titles mentioned. 

With a Vengeance fell flat, hindered by one dimensional characters, coincidences that seemed too good to be true, a protagonist who set up a way to elaborate a scheme where everything had to go right (and her pockets had to be deep). Even with suspension of belief, the originality of intent wavered mightily throughout, and honestly, but in the end the red flags were just too much to overlook. 

When he will return to those intriguing bump-in-the-night mysteries he’s built a following off of. The answer is known. The Unknown is slated for August 2026. 

A century ago, five vanished from a Vermont island, leaving behind only five dresses and a supernatural mystery. 

A century later, a struggling actress lands a role in a movie about the disappearance, her research trip to the island turns terrifying as strange occurrences and a sudden health emergency leave her and the cast stranded. A new wave of disappearances begins, and the race is on to decipher a century-old diary to prevent the island’s dark history from claiming them all. 

I’m ready for it, and I think (at least for me) this will put the sour taste of With a Vengeance out of my mouth. 

I strongly encourage these novels by Riley Sager though: Home Before Dark, The House Across the Lake, Lock Every Door, Final Girls, and The Only One Left. 

Book cover for “Final Girls” by Riley Sager, featuring a dark forest background with a lone woman in a blue dress standing beneath red title text.
Book cover for “Lock Every Door” by Riley Sager, showing a purple-lit apartment hallway with multiple doors and bold pink title text.
Book cover for “The House Across the Lake” by Riley Sager, depicting a brightly lit house reflected in dark lake water at night, with handwritten-style yellow title text.
Book cover for “The Only One Left” by Riley Sager, showing a large, ominous house perched on a rocky cliff against a red sky, with bold blue title text.
Book cover for “Home Before Dark” by Riley Sager, featuring a dark green haunted house silhouette surrounded by glowing lights against a shadowy background.

They all show his consistent truth as a writer – telling stories built around traumatized and unreliable narrators who must face a dark event or place that resurfaces from their past, forcing them to question the realism of their memories and perceptions of the world. We aren’t just trying to figure out who the real antagonist is but also grasping with the illusion of whether the person telling the story is even telling the truth. 

Each one of these is an addicting ride.

Which novel will you be checking out? Comment below.

Riley Sager’s name and cover images are linked to his author page on the BCCLS catalog to make it easy for you to reserve his titles. 

Hit subscribe to get Hoboken Public Library Staff Picks to your email!

Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

Tags: , , , ,

A Japanese Thriller: Kanae Minato’s Penance

2 Oct

The death of a child is always tragic, even more so if the child is murdered and their killer remains free for fifteen years with no clue as to who the killer might be and the only witnesses to the crime all claim that they can’t remember his face. In Kanae Minato’s Penance, these are the circumstances that befall four young girls when one of their friends is brutally murdered and her mother vows vengeance against the girls unless the killer is caught before the statute of limitations is up. 

Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the characters, Sae, Maki, Akiko, and Yuko and what each of them did the day of the murder and what life for each of them was like going forward. 

The connecting threads between the four and the murder of their friend all connect to each other in unique ways, each one of them having to face an aftermath for what happened the night of their friend’s murder. 

Minato’s prose are gripping, giving each character a unique voice while still keeping the mystery going as to who the killer could possibly be, with each character providing a unique clue until the final chapter with the girl’s mother, where all the puzzle pieces fit together and we are left with an ending that is both ambiguous and satisfying at the same time. It’s easy to see why Minato’s considered to be one of Japan’s most influential thriller and mystery novelists today. 

Penance is an excellent read that many mystery readers will enjoy and a great introduction to Kanae Minato’s work. 

Written by:
Lauren Lapinski
Library Assistant

← Older Entries