Review: The Night Swim
St. Martins Press is one of my favorite publishing imprints. They consistently publish novels that I can’t put down, so whenever I receive an email from them with an invitation to read a new book, I jump at the chance. Last year, I had the opportunity to read an early digital copy of Megan Goldin’s The Escape Room. It was phenomenal, and if you haven’t read it yet – GO GET IT! Having loved The Escape Room, I was thrilled to be offered the chance to read an early copy of her latest thriller. While not as successful for me as her previous novel, The Night Swim is nonetheless a compulsively readable story.
While in town to cover a rape trial for her true crime podcast, Rachel Krall is pulled into an investigation of another death that occurred in the same small coastal North Carolina town 25 years earlier. Goldin’s prose is smooth and she draws the reader in immediately. This is a book that is difficult to put down. She crafts the characters and the story so skillfully that you HAVE to know the jury’s verdict in the rape trial and you desperately want to know what truly happened to Jenny Stills a quarter of a century earlier.
I think, for me, where this falls short of The Escape Room, is that I was able to figure out the whodunnit, and the answer made me both angry and sad. I also think that I’m not in the best headspace for reading books that are so centered around rape. This was a hard book for me to read, for all that it was well-written and timely. I can’t wait to see what Goldin writes next. I’m sure it will be unputdownable.
Tails from the Dog-side 