In this new thriller from the author of The Escape Room, a true crime podcast host covering a controversial rape trial in a small town becomes obsessed with solving a brutal murder that took place there a quarter of a century before.
THE NIGHT SWIM
by Megan Goldin
St. Martin’s Press (North America) | Penguin Random House Australia, August 2020
(chez The Gernert Company – voir catalogue)
After the first season of her true crime podcast became an overnight sensation and set an innocent man free, Rachel Krall is now a household name—and the last hope for thousands of people seeking justice. But she’s used to being recognized for her voice, not her face. Which makes it all the more unsettling when she finds a note on her car windshield, addressed to her, begging for help. The small seaside town of Neapolis is being torn apart by a devastating rape trial. The town’s golden boy, a swimmer destined for Olympic greatness, has been accused of raping a high school student, the beloved granddaughter of the town’s legendary police chief. Under huge pressure to make Season Three of her podcast a success, Rachel throws herself into covering the rape trial —but the mysterious letters keep showing up in unexpected places. Someone is following her, and she won’t stop until Rachel finds out what happened to her sister twenty-five years ago. Officially, Jenny Stills tragically drowned while swimming at night at a local beach, but the writer insists her sister was murdered—and when Rachel starts asking questions, nobody seems to want to answer. The past and present start to collide as Rachel uncovers startling connections between the two cases, connections that will change the course of the trial and the lives of everyone involved. Electrifying and propulsive, THE NIGHT SWIM asks: Can a small town ever right the wrongs of its past? And what really happened to Jenny Stills?
“Goldin’s prose is inviting, at times electrifying, and always sensitive in dealing with hot-button issues…well done.” ―Booklist (starred)
“Outstanding…[Goldin’s thriller] casts a searing light on small-town politics.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Remarkably strong.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“A blistering plot and crisp writing make The Night Swim an unputdownable read.” ―Sarah Pekkanen, bestselling author of The Wife Between Us
Megan Goldin worked as a correspondent for Reuters and other media outlets where she covered war, peace, International terrorism and financial meltdowns in the Middle East and Asia. She is now based in Melbourne, Australia where she raises three sons and is a foster mum to Labrador puppies learning to be guide dogs.
THE RED ARROW follows an unnamed narrator, a failed novelist deeply in debt to his publisher, on a high-speed train from Rome to Modena, where he is desperate to find the famous Italian physicist whose memoir he’s been ghostwriting, and an whose disappearance in the middle of the project has threatened the narrator and his newly formed family with financial ruin. Moving swiftly and seamlessly through his past—including a chemical spill in West Virginia, a failed New York art career, psychedelic therapy in California, and a luxury beach resort in Sicily—THE RED ARROW contains multitudes: it is at once one of the most authentic descriptions of the experience of depression I’ve ever read, and a joyously earnest celebration of freedom from the toxic power of the ego; a spiraling meditation on time, memory, and the nature of the self; and a novel with the ineffable mystery of a poem, one whose originality lies in admitting that it’s not original at all. For we are each just a cloud of quotations with no fixed center—or, as the Physicist might put it, we are nothing more than interactions, like subatomic particles—and when we’re finally able to let go of the fiction of our discrete selves, all that is left is love.
