Tag Archives: thriller

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. 

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Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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Gone Girl and Lost Girls: Two Tales of Six Girls

1 Sep

I recently realized that two books I read this summer were from different genres but similar as they were both about missing women: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (fiction) and Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker (nonfiction).

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You may have already heard of Gone Girl. This popular thriller by Gillian Flynn topped many best-of lists last year. I happened upon a copy while shelving and grabbed it since it’s been so popular. Reese Witherspoon’s production company is adapting the story into a movie starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.

gone-girl

The Girl that’s Gone is Amy Elliott Dunne, who mysteriously disappears from her home the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary. This book has two alternating narrators–her husband Nick and Amy, via journal entries, which I think is an interesting device. Which narrator should the reader trust? Who is telling the truth?

After Nick and Amy lost their jobs during the recession, they moved from Brooklyn to Nick’s hometown of North Carthage, Missouri. Their relationship becomes strained as Amy, a native New Yorker, is a fish out of water in the Midwest while Nick easily assimilates.

Nick is the main suspect after Amy goes missing, which rocks the small town and immediately becomes a national news. Nick maintains his innocence despite everyone’s suspicions–his only ally is his twin sister Margo–and works to find other suspects in Amy’s disappearance. Will Nick clear his name? What happened to Amy?

***

Lost Girls is an impeccably reported true crime story about the disappearances of five women that worked as escorts. I read an interview with Kolker on Gawker, and was intrigued by this book.

lost-girls

The book begins with Shannan Gilbert’s disappearance from a home in Oak Beach, a secluded community on the south shore of Long Island. The local police force’s reluctant search for her eventually led to the discovery of four other women believed to be victims of a still-at-large serial killer targeting sex workers that advertise online through Craigslist and Backpage.

Lost Girls has two parts. Book 1 devotes two chapters to each woman’s background and her time as an escort up to her disappearance. Book 2 discusses theories about the identity of the women’s killer, and how the victims’ families have banded together, which Kolker first wrote about for New York magazine.

This book’s interior design felt interactive. Maps marking each woman’s home town and when she arrived in the New York City area precede each chapter. A timeline, a list of characters, and additional maps in the back of the book help readers keep up with all the details.

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There are definitely some suspenseful moments in Gone Girl that grabbed my attention, but ultimately the book came up short for me. Flynn does an excellent job of spinning a twisted tale and describing the bleak, recession-ravaged Missouri town where Nick and Amy live. I don’t recommend Gone Girl but won’t discourage anyone from reading it, so they can draw their own conclusions*.

I don’t recall much about the original cases on which Lost Girls are based, but found the presentation of the stories and details so compelling. Kolker spent a lot of time with the women’s families and friends and wrote thoughtfully about the five women. Most notably, he neither passed judgement on their decisions to work as escorts nor blamed them for their deaths.

To me, Lost Girls is a better book. I’ve recommended it to friends and family since finishing it. By no means is it a happy story (these women had tough lives), but I found it engaging. I empathized with the families and their losses. At parts I was furious about the complacency shown by the police departments investigating the disappearances.

Gone Girl made me angry for different reasons. One was the ending, which I found unsatisfying. Also, I found most of the characters unlikable. Amy and Nick are written as such terrible people and they deserve each other.

If you read (or have read) either Gone Girl or Lost Girls (or both!) let me know what you think in the comments, or at hobkref@bccls.org.

What books have you read this summer that you liked? Did you read anything you didn’t like?

-Kerry Weinstein, Reference Librarian.

*According to Book Riot, I am not the only reader that didn’t enjoy Gone Girl.

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