Author: Matthew Sullivan
Publication Information: Hanover Square Press. 2025. 416 pages.
ISBN: 1335041796 / 978-1335041791
Rating: ★★★
Book Source: I received this book through NetGalley and the Harlequin Trade Publishing's Winter 2025 Blog Tour Program free of cost in exchange for an honest review.
Opening Sentence: "Something was there."
Favorite Quote: "Collection was distraction. It allowed the journey to never end, like the roads he walked each day."
***** BLOG TOUR *****
Review
Soap Lake is an actual lake and an actual town. The small town has a population around 1,800. In the state of Washington, this lake has many unique features. Its layers of water do not mix; the scientific term is meromictic. It is a "soda" lake, meaning it has a high alkaline nature. It was formed by glacial flooding at the end of the last ice age. It has the name "Soap Lake" because it has a natural foam and its high mineral content gives the water a slick, soapy feel. The lake is about two square miles and is said to have some of the most diverse mineral content in the world. As such, many believe the water to have medical properties. In fact, for a period of time, the location became a site of spas and sanitariums for those suffering from a wide variety of ailments.The science provides the background for this story because it is the science that brings the main character - Abigail - and her scientist husband Eli to Soap Lake. The story goes that Eli and Abigail settle into a house, and Eli settles into his work. Eli lets himself be tempted by another scientific project in Europe. Abigail is left alone in a new place with no real support system. Then, strange things start happening.
A child is found. A dead woman is found. A connection to the past is found. More strange happenings in the past form a pattern. The question is why and what does it mean for Abigail. I say only Abigail because Eli leaves. This is very much Abigail's story not Eli and Abigail's.
This book is part science fiction because the reality of the lake is based in its science. This book is part thriller and murder mystery. The book is part urban legend with Treetop, the bogeyman of Soap Lake.
Like Matthew Sullivan's Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, the book slowly peels back the layers to connect past to present. The crimes described are graphic and violent; so, reader, be aware. The ending, when it comes, reverts the mystery to seemingly prosaic issues. I expect something more unusual based on the rest of the book. In addition, I finish unsure if I even understand the reasons why behind the mystery.
This book does get bonus points for featuring a library and librarians who unwittingly become custodian of vital scientific and local history!
About the Book
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 desert, 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 his mother Esme’s death. 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.
About the Author
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.Excerpt
1
Abigail
Something was there.
An animal, Abigail was certain, loping in the sagebrush: a twist of fuzz moving through the desert at the edge of her sight. The morning had already broken a hundred. Her glasses steamed and sunscreen stung her eyes—
Or maybe she hadn’t seen anything.
Yesterday, while walking along this desolate irrigation road, she’d spotted a cow skull between tumbleweeds, straight out of a tattoo parlor, but when she ran toward it, bracing to take a picture to send to Eli across the planet—proof, perhaps, that she ever left the house—she discovered it was just a white plastic grocery bag snagged on a curl of sage bark.
Somehow. Way out here.
The desert was scabby with dark basalt, bristled with the husks of flowers, and nothing was ever there.
When Eli first told her he’d landed a grant to research a rare lake in the Pacific Northwest, Abigail thought ferns and rain, ale and slugs, Sasquatch and wool.
And then they got here, to this desert where no one lived. Not a fern or slug in sight.
This had been the most turbulent year of her life.
Eleven months ago, they met.
Seven months ago, they married.
Six months ago, they moved from her carpeted condo in Denver to this sunbaked town on the shores of Soap Lake, a place where neither knew a soul.
Their honeymoon had lasted almost three months—Eli whistling in his downstairs lab, Abigail unpacking and painting upstairs—and then he kissed her at the airport, piled onto a plane, and moved across the world to work in a different lab, on a different project, at a different lake.
In Poland.
When she remembered him lately, she remembered photographs of him.
The plan had been to text all the time, daily calls, romantic flights to Warsaw, but the reality was that Eli had become too busy to chat and seemed more frazzled than ever. This week had been particularly bad because he’d been off the grid on a research trip, so every call went to voicemail, every text into the Polish abyss. And then at five o’clock this morning, her phone pinged and Abigail shot right out of a drowning sleep to grab it, as if he’d tossed her a life preserver from six thousand miles away.
And this is what he’d had to say:
sorry missed you. so much work & my research all fd up. i’ll call this weekend. xo e
As she was composing a response—her phone the only glow in their dark, empty home—he added a postscript that stabbed her in the heart like an icicle.
P.S. maybe it time since remember using time to figure out self life?
What kind of a sentence was that? And what was a “self life” anyway?
Abigail had called him right away. When he didn’t pick up she went down to the lab he’d set up in their daylight basement. She opened a few of his binders with their charts of Soap Lake, their colorful DNA diagrams, their photos of phosphorescent microbes, as cosmic as images from deep space. She breathed the papery dust of his absence and tried to imagine he’d just stepped out for a minute and would be back in a flash, her clueless brilliant husband, pen between his teeth, hair a smoky eruption, mustard stains on the plaid flannel bathrobe he wore in place of a lab coat.
From one of his gleaming refrigerators, Abigail retrieved a rack of capped glass tubes that contained the Miracle Water and the Miracle Microbes collected from the mineral lake down the hill— she sometimes wondered if her limnologist husband would be more at home on the shores of Loch Ness—and held one until a memory arose, like a visit from a friend: Eli, lifting a water sample up to the window as if he were gazing through a telescope, shaking it so it fizzed and foamed. And then he was gone again.
She hated that she did this. Came down here and caressed his equipment like a creep. Next she’d be smelling his bathrobe, collecting hairs from his brush. It was as if she felt compelled to remind herself that Eli was doing important work and, as the months of distance piled up, that he was even real.
Back when they’d first started dating, Abigail had been the busy one, the one who said yes to her boss too much and had to skim her calendar each time Eli wanted to go to dinner or a movie. Of course her job as an administrative assistant in a title insurance office had never felt like enough, but when she mentioned this restlessness to Eli, finding her path—figure out self life—had suddenly become a centerpiece of their move to Soap Lake. But they got here and nothing had happened. It wasn’t just a switch you flipped.
Abigail slid the tall tube of lake water back into its rack. Only when she let go, the tube somehow missed its slot and plunged to the floor like a bomb.
Kapow!
On the tile between her feet, a blossom of cloudy water and shattered glass.
She stood over the mess, clicking her fingernails against her teeth and imagining microbes squealing on the floor, flopping in the air like miniscule goldfish. She told herself, without conviction, it had been an accident.
And then she stepped over the spill, put the rack back in the fridge and, surprised at the immediacy of her shame, went for a walk in this scorching desert.
It stunned her, how harsh and gorgeous it was.
Loneliness: it felt sometimes like it possessed you.
She hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a month, outside of a few people in the Soap Lake service industry. There was the guy who made her a watery latte at the gas station the other morning, then penised the back of her hand with his finger when he passed it over. And the newspaper carrier, an old woman with white braids and a pink cowgirl hat, who raced through town in a windowless minivan. She told Abigail she was one DUI away from unemployment, but the weekly paper was never late. And the cute pizza delivery dude who was so high he sat in her driveway on his phone for half an hour before coming to the door with her cold cheese pizza, saying, Yes, ma’am. Thanks, ma’am, which was sweet but totally freaked her out. And the lady with the painted boomerang eyebrows in the tampon aisle at the grocery store who gave her unwanted advice on the best lube around for spicing up menopause, to which Abigail guffawed and responded too loudly, “Thanks, but I’m not even goddamned forty!”
At least she’d discovered these maintenance roads: miles and miles of gravel and dirt, no vehicles allowed, running alongside the massive irrigation canals that brought Canadian snowmelt from the Columbia River through the Grand Coulee Dam to the farms spread all over this desert. The water gushed through the main canals, thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep, and soon branched off to other, smaller canals that branched off to orchards and fields and ranches and dairies and soil and seeds and sprouts and leaves and, eventually, yummy vital food: grocery store shelves brimming with apples and milk and pizza-flavored Pringles.
Good soil. Blazing sun. Just add water and food was born.
Almost a trillion gallons a year moved through these canals. T: trillion.
All that water way out here, pouring through land so dry it crackled underfoot.
She halted on the road. Pressed her lank, brown hair behind her ear. Definitely heard something, a faint yip or caw.
She scanned the horizon for the source of the sound and there it was again, a smudge of movement in the wavering heat. Something running away.
A few times out here she’d seen coyote. Lots of quail, the occasional pheasant. Once, in a fallow field close to town, a buck with a missing antler that looked from a distance like a unicorn.
Not running away, the smudge out there. Running toward. She was nowhere near a signal yet her instinct was to touch her phone. She craned around to glimpse the vanishing point of the road behind, gauging how far she’d walked and, if things got bad, how far she’d have to run.
Three miles, minimum. Six miles, tops.
Definitely approaching.
Not something. Someone.
A human. Alone.
Running. A boy.
A little boy. Sprinting.
Abigail froze as their eyes met, and suddenly the boy exploded out of the desert, slamming into her thighs with an oof! He wore yellow pajamas and Cookie Monster slippers covered in prickly burrs.
He clung to her legs so tightly that she almost tipped over. When she registered the crusty blood on his chin and cheeks and encasing his hands like gloves, she felt herself begin to cry, scared-to-sobbing in one second flat.
Deep breath. Shirt wipe.
“Hey! Are you hurt? Look at me. Are you hurt?”
The boy wasn’t crying, but his skin was damp and he was panting hot and wouldn’t let go of her legs. She felt a hummingbird inside of his chest.
She knelt in the gravel and unfolded his arms, turning them over at the wrist. She lifted his shirt and spun him around as best she could. He had some welts and scratches from running through the brush, and the knees of his pj’s were badly scuffed, but he wasn’t cut, not anywhere serious, which meant— The blood belonged to someone else.
Abigail
Something was there.
An animal, Abigail was certain, loping in the sagebrush: a twist of fuzz moving through the desert at the edge of her sight. The morning had already broken a hundred. Her glasses steamed and sunscreen stung her eyes—
Or maybe she hadn’t seen anything.
Yesterday, while walking along this desolate irrigation road, she’d spotted a cow skull between tumbleweeds, straight out of a tattoo parlor, but when she ran toward it, bracing to take a picture to send to Eli across the planet—proof, perhaps, that she ever left the house—she discovered it was just a white plastic grocery bag snagged on a curl of sage bark.
Somehow. Way out here.
The desert was scabby with dark basalt, bristled with the husks of flowers, and nothing was ever there.
When Eli first told her he’d landed a grant to research a rare lake in the Pacific Northwest, Abigail thought ferns and rain, ale and slugs, Sasquatch and wool.
And then they got here, to this desert where no one lived. Not a fern or slug in sight.
This had been the most turbulent year of her life.
Eleven months ago, they met.
Seven months ago, they married.
Six months ago, they moved from her carpeted condo in Denver to this sunbaked town on the shores of Soap Lake, a place where neither knew a soul.
Their honeymoon had lasted almost three months—Eli whistling in his downstairs lab, Abigail unpacking and painting upstairs—and then he kissed her at the airport, piled onto a plane, and moved across the world to work in a different lab, on a different project, at a different lake.
In Poland.
When she remembered him lately, she remembered photographs of him.
The plan had been to text all the time, daily calls, romantic flights to Warsaw, but the reality was that Eli had become too busy to chat and seemed more frazzled than ever. This week had been particularly bad because he’d been off the grid on a research trip, so every call went to voicemail, every text into the Polish abyss. And then at five o’clock this morning, her phone pinged and Abigail shot right out of a drowning sleep to grab it, as if he’d tossed her a life preserver from six thousand miles away.
And this is what he’d had to say:
sorry missed you. so much work & my research all fd up. i’ll call this weekend. xo e
As she was composing a response—her phone the only glow in their dark, empty home—he added a postscript that stabbed her in the heart like an icicle.
P.S. maybe it time since remember using time to figure out self life?
What kind of a sentence was that? And what was a “self life” anyway?
Abigail had called him right away. When he didn’t pick up she went down to the lab he’d set up in their daylight basement. She opened a few of his binders with their charts of Soap Lake, their colorful DNA diagrams, their photos of phosphorescent microbes, as cosmic as images from deep space. She breathed the papery dust of his absence and tried to imagine he’d just stepped out for a minute and would be back in a flash, her clueless brilliant husband, pen between his teeth, hair a smoky eruption, mustard stains on the plaid flannel bathrobe he wore in place of a lab coat.
From one of his gleaming refrigerators, Abigail retrieved a rack of capped glass tubes that contained the Miracle Water and the Miracle Microbes collected from the mineral lake down the hill— she sometimes wondered if her limnologist husband would be more at home on the shores of Loch Ness—and held one until a memory arose, like a visit from a friend: Eli, lifting a water sample up to the window as if he were gazing through a telescope, shaking it so it fizzed and foamed. And then he was gone again.
She hated that she did this. Came down here and caressed his equipment like a creep. Next she’d be smelling his bathrobe, collecting hairs from his brush. It was as if she felt compelled to remind herself that Eli was doing important work and, as the months of distance piled up, that he was even real.
Back when they’d first started dating, Abigail had been the busy one, the one who said yes to her boss too much and had to skim her calendar each time Eli wanted to go to dinner or a movie. Of course her job as an administrative assistant in a title insurance office had never felt like enough, but when she mentioned this restlessness to Eli, finding her path—figure out self life—had suddenly become a centerpiece of their move to Soap Lake. But they got here and nothing had happened. It wasn’t just a switch you flipped.
Abigail slid the tall tube of lake water back into its rack. Only when she let go, the tube somehow missed its slot and plunged to the floor like a bomb.
Kapow!
On the tile between her feet, a blossom of cloudy water and shattered glass.
She stood over the mess, clicking her fingernails against her teeth and imagining microbes squealing on the floor, flopping in the air like miniscule goldfish. She told herself, without conviction, it had been an accident.
And then she stepped over the spill, put the rack back in the fridge and, surprised at the immediacy of her shame, went for a walk in this scorching desert.
It stunned her, how harsh and gorgeous it was.
Loneliness: it felt sometimes like it possessed you.
She hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a month, outside of a few people in the Soap Lake service industry. There was the guy who made her a watery latte at the gas station the other morning, then penised the back of her hand with his finger when he passed it over. And the newspaper carrier, an old woman with white braids and a pink cowgirl hat, who raced through town in a windowless minivan. She told Abigail she was one DUI away from unemployment, but the weekly paper was never late. And the cute pizza delivery dude who was so high he sat in her driveway on his phone for half an hour before coming to the door with her cold cheese pizza, saying, Yes, ma’am. Thanks, ma’am, which was sweet but totally freaked her out. And the lady with the painted boomerang eyebrows in the tampon aisle at the grocery store who gave her unwanted advice on the best lube around for spicing up menopause, to which Abigail guffawed and responded too loudly, “Thanks, but I’m not even goddamned forty!”
At least she’d discovered these maintenance roads: miles and miles of gravel and dirt, no vehicles allowed, running alongside the massive irrigation canals that brought Canadian snowmelt from the Columbia River through the Grand Coulee Dam to the farms spread all over this desert. The water gushed through the main canals, thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep, and soon branched off to other, smaller canals that branched off to orchards and fields and ranches and dairies and soil and seeds and sprouts and leaves and, eventually, yummy vital food: grocery store shelves brimming with apples and milk and pizza-flavored Pringles.
Good soil. Blazing sun. Just add water and food was born.
Almost a trillion gallons a year moved through these canals. T: trillion.
All that water way out here, pouring through land so dry it crackled underfoot.
She halted on the road. Pressed her lank, brown hair behind her ear. Definitely heard something, a faint yip or caw.
She scanned the horizon for the source of the sound and there it was again, a smudge of movement in the wavering heat. Something running away.
A few times out here she’d seen coyote. Lots of quail, the occasional pheasant. Once, in a fallow field close to town, a buck with a missing antler that looked from a distance like a unicorn.
Not running away, the smudge out there. Running toward. She was nowhere near a signal yet her instinct was to touch her phone. She craned around to glimpse the vanishing point of the road behind, gauging how far she’d walked and, if things got bad, how far she’d have to run.
Three miles, minimum. Six miles, tops.
Definitely approaching.
Not something. Someone.
A human. Alone.
Running. A boy.
A little boy. Sprinting.
Abigail froze as their eyes met, and suddenly the boy exploded out of the desert, slamming into her thighs with an oof! He wore yellow pajamas and Cookie Monster slippers covered in prickly burrs.
He clung to her legs so tightly that she almost tipped over. When she registered the crusty blood on his chin and cheeks and encasing his hands like gloves, she felt herself begin to cry, scared-to-sobbing in one second flat.
Deep breath. Shirt wipe.
“Hey! Are you hurt? Look at me. Are you hurt?”
The boy wasn’t crying, but his skin was damp and he was panting hot and wouldn’t let go of her legs. She felt a hummingbird inside of his chest.
She knelt in the gravel and unfolded his arms, turning them over at the wrist. She lifted his shirt and spun him around as best she could. He had some welts and scratches from running through the brush, and the knees of his pj’s were badly scuffed, but he wasn’t cut, not anywhere serious, which meant— The blood belonged to someone else.
Buy Links
HarperCollins: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/midnight-in-soap-lake-matthew-sullivan?variant=43103022350370BookShop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/397/9781335041791
Barnes & Noble: http://aps.harpercollins.com/hc?isbn=9781335041791&retailer=barnesandnoble
Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=9781335041791&tag=hcg-02-20
Social Links
Author Website: http://matthewjsullivan.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mickmatthew1/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthew.j.sullivan.77/
Please share your thoughts and leave a comment. I would love to "talk" to you.
