Interview with Riley Sager, Author of With a Vengeance (and Many Other Mysteries)
All About Agatha Christie
Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Riley Sager has been producing bestselling mystery thrillers with Christie-like consistency for nine years now. His latest, With a Vengeance, is his most Christie-like yet. It was a pleasure to speak with him about the book, Christie's influence, and what it's like to be a mystery writer in the world of publishing today.
You can visit Riley and peruse his prodigious output on his website here.
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Visit the podcast on Instagram, and me personally at my author website.
Loose Lips, the second book in my Ghostwriter Mysteries series, is currently available for purchase.
You can also buy The Busy Body, the first book in my Ghostwriter Mysteries series, in paperback at your bookseller of choice (make it an indie if you possibly can) in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia and New Zealand.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and drinking every single mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime Dame Agatha Christie. |
| 0:14.8 | I am Kemper Donovan, and boy do I have a great interview episode for you today, listeners. |
| 0:22.8 | Mystery author Riley Sager is on the show, a writer who has lived on the bestseller lists now for nearly a decade, |
| 0:33.4 | and who has just come out with by far his most Agatha Christie-esque mystery. |
| 0:38.9 | Before I go to the interview, I just want to give a spoiler warning about two major Christie titles. |
| 0:46.8 | And then there were none and Murder on the Orient Express. |
| 0:50.3 | If you have not read either of those books, just be warned that Riley and I are going to |
| 0:57.1 | spoil the heck out of them, because they figure into his novel a whole bunch. You have been warned, |
| 1:03.6 | and now let's go to the interview. |
| 1:06.3 | Yeah. My guest today is the author Riley Sager, who made his pseudonymous debut in 2017 with the psychological thriller Final Girls, |
| 1:31.5 | and since then, he has published a book a year all the way through to this year's offering |
| 1:36.4 | 2025s with a vengeance, a thriller that heavily references to Christy Crown Jules, and which will be the focus of our discussion today. |
| 1:47.0 | So that is nine novels in all, and every single one of them, a New York Times and global bestseller. |
| 1:52.8 | At this point, readers have come to depend on Riley Seeger to deliver a taught thriller, |
| 1:58.2 | often with elements of horror and usually set somewhere familiar for the genre, |
| 2:02.6 | only for that familiarity to be stripped away by means of variously ingenious twists and turns. |
| 2:09.6 | Here is a sampling of those familiar thriller settings from over the last nine years. |
| 2:14.6 | A creepy summer camp, a creepy apartment building, A haunted house. I think to call it a |
| 2:19.8 | creepy haunted house would be redundant. A ride share gone horrifically wrong and a home care situation |
| 2:26.4 | for an elderly woman gone equally horrifically wrong. While many of these books incorporate |
| 2:31.7 | events from the past, which impinge on the present, |
| 2:34.6 | something that is very familiar to us Christy fans, for the most part Riley's books take place |
... |
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