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.

I am Kemper Donovan, and boy do I have a great interview episode for you today, listeners.

Mystery author Riley Sager is on the show, a writer who has lived on the bestseller lists now for nearly a decade,

and who has just come out with by far his most Agatha Christie-esque mystery.

Before I go to the interview, I just want to give a spoiler warning about two major Christie titles.

And then there were none and Murder on the Orient Express.

If you have not read either of those books, just be warned that Riley and I are going to

spoil the heck out of them, because they figure into his novel a whole bunch. You have been warned,

and now let's go to the interview.

Yeah. My guest today is the author Riley Sager, who made his pseudonymous debut in 2017 with the psychological thriller Final Girls,

and since then, he has published a book a year all the way through to this year's offering

2025s with a vengeance, a thriller that heavily references to Christy Crown Jules, and which will be the focus of our discussion today.

So that is nine novels in all, and every single one of them, a New York Times and global bestseller.

At this point, readers have come to depend on Riley Seeger to deliver a taught thriller,

often with elements of horror and usually set somewhere familiar for the genre,

only for that familiarity to be stripped away by means of variously ingenious twists and turns.

Here is a sampling of those familiar thriller settings from over the last nine years.

A creepy summer camp, a creepy apartment building, A haunted house. I think to call it a

creepy haunted house would be redundant. A ride share gone horrifically wrong and a home care situation

for an elderly woman gone equally horrifically wrong. While many of these books incorporate

events from the past, which impinge on the present,

something that is very familiar to us Christy fans, for the most part Riley's books take place

...