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A Novel
by Matthew Sullivan
A lake with mysterious properties. A town haunted by urban legend. Two women whose lives intersect in terrifying ways. Welcome to Soap Lake, a town to rival Twin Peaks and Stephen King's Castle Rock.
When Abigail agreed to move to Soap Lake, Washington, for her husband's research, she expected old-growth forests and craft beer, folksy neighbors and the world's largest lava lamp. Instead, after her husband jets off to Poland for a research trip, she finds herself alone, in a town surrounded by sand and haunted by its own urban legends.
But when a young boy runs through the desert into Abigail's arms, her life becomes entwined with his and the questions surrounding the death of his mother, Esme. In Abigail's search for answers, she enlists the help of a recovering addict turned librarian, a grieving brother, a broken motel owner and a mentally shattered conspiracy theorist to unearth Esme's tragic past, the town's violent history and the secret magic locked in the lake her husband was sent there to study.
As she gets closer to the answers, past and present crimes begin to collide, and Abigail finds herself gaining the unwelcome attention of the town's unofficial mascot, the rubber-suited orchard stalker known as TreeTop, a specter who seems to be lurking in every dark shadow and around every shady corner.
A sweeping, decade-spanning mystery brimming with quirky characters and puzzle-hunt scenarios, Midnight in Soap Lake is a modern-day Twin Peaks—a rich, expansive universe that readers will enter and never forget.
What are you reading this week? (7/2/2025)
Finished A Land So Wide for BookBrowse. Then a quick read of Elie Wiesel's Night for my Banned Bookclub. Will be interesting to learn why some people want the book banned, the bookclub will be on Friday. Just started Midnight in Soap Lake by local author Matthew Sullivan. Fun to read a book that ...
-Paula_Walters
"This is a fascinating mystery with small-town intrigue and a magical, scientific angle based on a real place." —Booklist
"Midnight in Soap Lake hooked me from page one. This twisty, smart thriller is brimming with complex characters, a page-turning plot and big questions of science, nature, marriage and murder. Matthew Sullivan expertly blends fact, fable and the evocative setting of Soap Lake in rural Washington state to create a spellbinding novel—I adored it." —Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics
"A shimmering, shadowy tarn of a mystery, rippling with complex heroines, David Lynchian townspeople, sinister bogeymen (TreeTop is terrifying!), and a spectacularly rich storyline set in smalltown Washington State. Fans of Tana French, Jess Walter, and Kate Atkinson will absolutely love this novel." —Sharma Shields, author of The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac
"Midnight in Soap Lake made me fall in love with reading all over again! It's everything I adore in books: a tangled mystery, rich characters, a terrifying villain, and a strange setting, in which everything harbors a secret. I'll be handing copies of this one to my friends for years!" —Stuart Turton, bestselling author of The Last Murder at the End of the World and The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
This information about Midnight in Soap Lake was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matthew Sullivan is the beloved author of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, an Indie Next Pick, B&N Discover pick, a GoodReads Choice Award finalist and winner of the Colorado Book Award. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho and has been a resident writer at Yaddo, Centrum, and the Vermont Studio Center. His short stories have been awarded the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editors' Award for Fiction. His writing has been featured in the New York Times Modern Love column, The Daily Beast, and Shelf Awareness amongst others.
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