“Sullivan is channeling ‘Twin Peaks’ in his latest novel…[He] evokes the richness of a small-town community as well as the secrets-filled uneasiness simmering just below its placid surface.”
—The New York Times Book Review (Best Mysteries of the Month & Crime Novels We Love)
“Midnight in Soap Lake has it all—ripping dialogue, conspiracy theories, relatable and well-drawn characters, and suspense…”
—Cascadia Daily News
“With strange characters, a deranged villain, and a magical body of water, Midnight in Soap Lake is a bingeable, genre-bending story about grief, truth, and what really haunts us.”
—5280 Magazine
A lake with mysterious properties.
A town haunted by urban legend.
Two women whose lives intersect in terrifying ways.
Welcome to Soap Lake.
Available wherever books are sold, in hardcover, ebook, large print, and audiobook (wonderfully narrated by Kristen Sieh).
(Published by HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press/HQ UK)
Midnight in Soap Lake is Book Two in The Midnight Cycle, a series of stand-alone, thematically-linked novels.
Book Three of The Midnight Cycle–The Midnight Games–will be published in early 2027. It is set in Denver in the 1980s and tells the story of Detective Harry Moberg (the reclusive detective from Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore) in the days leading up to The Hammerman case. More to come…
More details about Midnight in Soap Lake, including reviews, interviews and spoilers, can be found here.
Upcoming Events:
Feb. 7, 1 pm. American Association of University Women’s Writers Forum, Anacortes Public Library, Anacortes, WA.
Feb, 25, 6:30 p.m. Pacific Northwest Writers Association. “A Nicer Kind of Murder.” A presentation on the evolution of crime fiction. PNWA Writer’s Cottage, Issaquah, WA. Registration required.
March 28, 6 pm. Village Books, Bellingham, WA. Michelle Maryk (The Found Object Society), in conversation with Matthew Sullivan.
About me:
Matthew Sullivan is the author of the novel Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, which was an IndieNext pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, a GoodReads Choice Award finalist, and winner of the Colorado Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Daily Beast, The Spokesman-Review, Sou’wester and elsewhere, and his stories have been awarded the Florida Review Editor’s Prize and the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He grew up in a family of eight kids in Aurora, Colorado, and received his B.A. from the University of San Francisco and his M.F.A. from the University of Idaho. After working as a bookseller at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver and Brookline Booksmith in Boston, he spent 20 years as a tenured instructor teaching writing, literature and film at a rural community college in the high desert of Washington State. He is married to a librarian, Libby, and now lives in Anacortes, WA, along the Salish Sea. His new stand-alone novel, Midnight in Soap Lake, pitched as “Twin Peaks meets Tana French,” is available now from Harper Collins/Hanover Square Press.
