MIDNIGHT IN SOAP LAKE
Author: Matthew Sullivan
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781335041791
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Harlequin Trade
Publishing / Hanover Square Press
Price $28.99
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.
Buy Links:
HarperCollins: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/midnight-in-soap-lake-matthew-sullivan?variant=43103022350370
BookShop.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
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.
Author Bio:
|
Social Links:
Author Website: http://matthewjsullivan.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mickmatthew1/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthew.j.sullivan.77/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5690035.Matthew_J_Sullivan
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