It has a good, twisty plot that draws you in and makes it hard to put the book down. This isn’t a run-of-the-mill crime novel. As Freyja commented: “She’s not just a ‘dumb blonde’, she gets things done” and we felt it made a nice change to have a young, believable protagonist who wasn’t a detective. This might go some way to explaining how she manages to convey the effects of violence and sexual assault so well.Īlthough Rachel is really just the vehicle for telling this story, we liked her. As Feebs said, rape is a tricky subject in almost every culture, and especially so in the trial-by-drama court system of the USA.īefore becoming a novelist, Megan Goldin worked as a foreign correspondent in Asia and Middle East, where she covered war zones and wrote about war, peace and international terrorism.

But behind these surface considerations we felt the rape was dealt with fairly and sympathetically. Given that this story deals with rape it’s perhaps not surprising that some of the characters felt a bit predictable – the over-entitled defendant and his unlikeable lawyer, a cranky judge, the fragile victim and a stern prosecutor. In the end the cases merge in an unexpected way which caught all of us by surprise. The two storylines are cleverly intertwined with some good plot twists, and the oddly passionless writing style highlights the tensions in both. When she starts asking questions she’s stonewalled, which of course makes her dig harder, and it’s not long before she realises both cases have marked similarities and are probably linked. She has a secret she’s been keeping for 25 years and she wants Rachel’s help to disclose it.Īs the letters keep arriving it’s as if Rachel is being stalked and almost against her will she is drawn into investigating the cold case. The letter writer is a woman called Hannah, who left the town when she was a 10-year-old girl after her sister drowned and her mother died of cancer. The second is a story told to Rachel, in a series of letters, of a mysterious death 25 years earlier.

The first is told by the narrator, Rachel, a successful true-crime podcaster who is there for a rape trial that has shocked and divided the town. Set in a small American town the novel runs two storylines side by side. Everyone who read it in our book group felt the same and it definitely merits every one of the 4+ Stars we awarded. The Night Swim is Megan Goldin’s third novel and it’s a story that grips you and doesn’t let go.

The night swim review