Rachel Krall has a very successful true crime podcast where she has helped solve cold cases. However, for this new season she wants to try something different. Rachel travels to the small town of Neapolis to cover the town’s controversial rape trial. While there, she is contacted several times, and sometimes in disturbing ways, by a fan who needs her help. Hannah never believed that her sister drowned twenty-five years ago, but she needs Rachel to find the what happened. Will the truth come out or will the town continue to protect its own?

The author seamlessly combines methodic courtroom drama with gripping psychological suspense. This book will keep readers up long after they have finished the last page. While it might be easy to correctly guess the guilty party from the past, readers will want to see how events unfold and if justice is served in both cases. Megan Goldin brilliantly inserts readers into the mindset of the characters. Hannah will live in their hearts for years to come. This is a must-read for all mystery and thriller fans.

Notes:

I signed up to honestly review an advanced e-copy of this book. Thanks to Netgalley/MacMillan/St. Martin’s Press for the opportunity.
This review was originally posted on the Ariesgrl Book Reviews website.

This is more of a 3.5/5.0 rating, for what it’s worth. Here’s the basic premise - what if the host of My Favorite Murder was covering the Brock Turner rape trial? And what if during that trial she uncovered another old case that remained unsolved?

It’s an interesting and topical premise, though it felt a bit rough around the edges and a bit too cute for its own good. As one point, the old case is largely told by letters the podcast host is getting from the sister — but these letters end dramatically, exactly as if they were written as chapters in a thriller. It starts to become impossible to think of them as letters. Other chapters are, theoretically, transcripts of the podcast episodes she’s recording while watching the trial. That works better but still feels clumsy.

The other thing I can’t quite figure out is why the author felt the need to make the trial so clearly the Brock Turner case (Stanford swimmer accused of rape). It’s such a publicly known thing it felt weird and awkward to - as one example - have the accused rapist be a star swimmer. Why not even change that one basic fact?

Regardless it’s a good read and I thank Net Galley for the free copy in exchange for an honest review. In fact, so many other reviews here rave about the authors prior novel that I’m going to check that out.

Ooooph! I just finished The Night Swim and I'm shook to my core. I loved authors last thriller The Escape Room and I was hoping for another wonderful twisted revenge fantasy...The Night Swim isn't that. It follows a newly popular true crime style podcast and the host Rachel, as she travels to follow a rape trial. The chapters are short and readable and the story switches points-of-view regularly-- but not too much.

Rape is frequently mentioned. The trial Rachel is covering is all about rape that is alleged against a popular Olympic swimmer hopeful and a drunk high school girl. It's harsh and real and some parts were hard to read. That's just the first mystery.
The second part of the story and the second mystery also involves rape. A rape and death that took place decades ago in the same town and that Rachel is informed of via notes from a victim's family member.

Both stories weave together seamlessly and were traumatic and hard to read at times, but I'm glad I pushed through to the end.

This story stay with me for a long time.

Be warned: sexual assault is a big part of the story and frequently mentioned.

Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. This was my first book by Goldin that I have read and will not be my last. I loved the crime podcast and the small town aspects in the book. It definitely felt all too real. Definitely recommend.

It took several chapters for this one to really keep my attention but about 20% of the way in, I couldn't put this one down.
I personally listen to podcasts now and then so this story intrigued me. Rachel is in the middle of a trial that's split and town and her job as the podcast director is to be impartial and truthful to all as she covers the trial of a local teenager claiming to be raped by a local swim champion.
Separately, as soon as she arrives in town she receives messages from a girl named Hannah whose sister died 20+ years ago. Hannah swears her sister was murdered, that she didn't drown as the story was told, even though Hannah was only 9 years old at the time.
While Rachel spends every waking moment investigating both cases, there are some who don't want her to know the truth about either case.

A podcast host reports on a present day murder case that sounds too similar to one that occurred 25 years ago. The host, Jenny, is lured into the old case by a series of anonymous notes, calls, strange meetings and clues that pique her interest. Could there be a connection between the two cases? Is this small town hiding a secret? She has to pursue it . After all, she IS the host of Guilty Or Not Guilty.

The Night Swim is a novel about a rape trial through the lens of a podcaster's eye.

Rachel is the mastermind behind the controversial podcast "Guilty or Not Guilty" which examines criminal cases with her critical eye. To create a spin on her third season she travels to Neapolis to cover a live rape trial. During Rachel's travels to the city, she finds a mysterious letter tucked under a windshield wiper of her car. The letter is a request from Hannah, a longterm fan and native from Neapolis. The letter unveils details of the unsolved death of Hannah's sister 20 years prior. As Rachel starts to cover the trial, she also starts to investigate the death of Hannah's sister. As the trial unfolds, a coverup starts to emerge and a strangely familiar theme starts to emerge between the death of the past and the rape trial. Written in alternative voices between Hannah, Rachel, and her Podcast, this story is a captivating page-turner that does not disappoint.

Thank you Netgalley, Megan Goldin and St. Martin's Press for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I honestly think this is the best ARC I've received from NetGalley. Great for fans of the mystery/thriller genre, but it also blends the present day obsession with podcasts. Strong female main character and the book focuses on society's views on rape culture. Some of the subject matter was hard to stomach, but it was written in a powerful, yet tasteful way, and I couldn't wait to get back to my book to finish the story. I will definitely recommend this book to anyone who will listen. And I will be on the look out for other books from this author. I could even see the main character getting a series.

The Night Swim by Megan Goldin tells the story of a podcaster, Rachel Krall, in town to cover a rape trial. As the book unfolds, she receives a strange note on her car from Hannah Stills. While covering the trial, Rachel gets pulled into investigating the death of a young girl from twenty five years earlier - Hannah’s sister.

On the surface this book has a great storyline and Goldin does a masterful job of interweaving the stories of Rachel and Hannah. However, the real story is about the difficulty of rape trials - both in terms of getting a verdict and the pain it causes the victim to relive the rape many times over. Often, the victim is portrayed as a slut, whore, and/or liar.

I appreciated that Goldin used her character’s voice to express this on multiple occasions. Whether or not she intended to use this story as a platform, readers will have a hard time not thinking about this book long after finishing it.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for the advanced copy.

Night Swim by Megan Goldin was some kind of thrill read y'all. The story first focuses on a podcast. Rachel has achieved fame for her true crime podcast where she revisits cases and has exonerated an innocent man. For the first time, she has decided to take on a trial as it happens. She heads to a small town where a sexual assault case has rocked the community. A high school boy known for his swimming prowess is the alleged perpetrator. Rachel takes on the story of this case seeking to help listeners understand how hard it is for survivors to come forward and all the complexities of a case of this nature. While in town, Rachel is contacted via letter about another case in the town that was never solved. 25 years earlier, Jenny Stills drowned. She knew how to swim, and her younger sister Hannah believes there is much more to her story. In addition to covering the case in the courtroom, Rachel takes on this cold case to finally discover what really happened to Jenny. Rachel does deep dives into both stories as she is committed to finding the truth. This was a thriller that kept me reading. As the secrets come to light, and y'all, there are some huge secret reveals, some common threads in the past and present also come to life. This is a heavy and emotional read given the focus, but it's also a pageturner that I quickly devoured because I needed both cases to be resolved. Thanks to NetGalley for the early look at this August 2020 release.

I love this book! I thought nothing would match the escape room, but this exceeded my expectations. Please, write more books with this lead character.

Thanks NetGalley for the ARC!

I'm truly not sure what I was expecting with this book, but I certainly wasn't expecting to be so thoroughly heartsick. This is not a negative criticism by any means. The author took a difficult and sensitive subject, rape, and did not hold back any punches. It is simultaneously refreshing and heartbreaking to hear someone call out society's treatment and reaction to sexual assault. There were very clear "ripped from the headlines" parallels in this book. Perhaps what is most disturbing about this read is the fact that these issues are so common. Most importantly the author begs us to analyze an important question. Why is it the responsibility of the victim to relive their trauma in order to seek justice?

I received an ARC of this enthralling book. It follows two events from different periods in time, with many surprises and twists along the way. I couldn't put it down until the very last page!

Rachel Krall, arriving in a small town to cover a rape trial for her podcast, finds a puzzling note on her car. The note pleads for her help in a past crime in the same town, an alleged drowning which the writer believes was a murder. More notes appear as she settles into the trial that has divided the town. Her partner, recovering from an accident, researches and follows leads from his hospital bed as she attends the courtroom procedures, interviews as many individuals as she can reach and writes her script. The actual podcasts are intermittent chapters which move the trial forward as flashbacks flesh out the events of both crimes. Eventually, what the reader suspects, occurs; the two stories weave together. I enjoy Megan Goldin’s style of advancing the storyline through quick chapter changes. I found, however, the podcasts’ content repetitive at times. This is the author’s second work I have read. I am a fan and look forward to a third.

I, like many other people, love true crime podcasts. They make my one-and-a-half-hour commute (yes, you read that right, and yes, it sucks as much as you think it does) bearable. So when I saw that The Night Swim was a mystery/thriller about a true crime podcast host, I requested it immediately. Unfortunately, I think my experience with true crime podcasts made this book less enjoyable, not more.

There were a lot of little inaccuracies that bothered me. Rachel Krall’s podcast episodes are very short and contain far more speculation than fact, and she doesn’t have that natural, conversational way of speaking that podcast listeners enjoy; her words read as very obviously scripted. She’s the only host, which I can only imagine is very boring to listen to and is certainly boring to read (there’s a reason most podcasts have at least two hosts). She records one of her episodes outside, while walking, which I can only imagine would be an audio nightmare. And her podcast is supposedly so universally popular that Rachel is a “household name.” The only podcast hosts I know of who are household names are celebrities who were already famous for something else.

There were even more details that damaged the book’s realism. Everyone Rachel speaks to is conveniently quick to open up and share plot-relevant details that most people wouldn’t give up so easily to a stranger. The wrongly convicted man who was the subject of the first season of Rachel’s podcast is released in short order after she reveals new evidence that exonerates him, which I find hard to believe; the American justice system will do anything in its power to keep people in prison even if it’s obvious that they’re innocent. And Hannah’s notes to Rachel are so riddled with flowery, unnecessary detail that I spent the whole time I was reading them rolling my eyes and thinking, “Who writes like this?”

I fully realize that I am being incredibly nitpicky and that most of these details may not even faze the average reader, but each one took me out of the story and prevented me from immersing myself. A much bigger issue was Rachel herself. I had no sense of her personality, unless you count “true crime podcast host” as a personality trait (I don’t). What little I learned about her was told, not shown. She was flat and lifeless. And I hated Hannah. You want justice for your sister, so you stalk a true crime podcast host who’s just trying to do her job? Even more frustrating, Rachel does exactly what Hannah wants and investigates her sister’s case, and even lets it distract her from her work.

I did like that Megan Goldin seemed to draw from real-life cases to inspire the ones she mentions or focuses on in this book, which added back some of the realism the book lost, although (as far as I know) neither the Jenny Stills case nor the Kelly Moore case were direct copies of any real case, so there was still room for creativity. I liked the trial scenes. I appreciated the commentary on rape and victim blaming that we got from the Kelly case, and I enjoyed slowly discovering the details of the Jenny case. And the ending was decent, though not unexpected.

I have to stress that I really don’t think Goldin is a bad writer, or that this is a bad book. I’m clearly in the minority here. I’m between two and three stars, but because there were so many instances when I wanted to put the book down for good, I have to go with two.

This book wasn't very unique... I can see where thriller fans will find it enjoyable, but it just didn't stand out to me as anything special. It did not hold my attention.

As a fan of podcasts, true crime, and true-crime podcasts, this book was made for me as a reader. I was worried how the "podcast narration" feel might translate to the page, but it worked very well. Great storytelling and great character building made this one of my favorite books so far this year. I would definitely like to read more from this author, and would even go so far as to say this might make a great series.

This intense novel goes a long way to explain why many female rape victims are often beaten down by the justice system that purports to represent and protect them.
Rachel Krall, a true crime podcaster travels to small town North Carolina to cover a high profile rape trial. high profile because the accused is a privileged young sport superstar, bound for Olympic glory and the victim is one of two sisters in a single parent family. On arrival, Rachel finds a note on her windshield about another similar incident that happened twenty five years previously in the same town. Soon Rachel is following the court case as well as conducting her own investigation into the older case.
What follows is a page-turning suspense story with many all-too-real moments which remind us that young female victims of assault or rape are often left vulnerable and open to public disparagement rather than given the support and help they need.
The author creates well-rounded characters. Rachel is brave, no-nonsense and willing to take risks. the male characters are well drawn and Golden does not fall into the trap of painting all her male characters with the same brush. A real page-turner that shines a spotlight on a very pressing issue.

What a ride. The author tackles the intricacies of proving rape in the courtroom, weaving together two stories, an old rape and murder, with a current rape trial. Rachel arrives in Neapolis to observe and record podcasts as a rape trial unfolds. But letters keep showing up begging her to look into an old rape and murder case which happened in this very town. As Rachel digs around, the townspeople grow uneasy. Why can’t she leave well enough alone? The current rape case brings out how difficult it is to actually get a rape conviction, being very dependent upon the traumatized raped girl’s testimony.
An enlightening read.

I didn’t read The Night Swim by Megan Goldin so much as I absorbed it. All of my senses were engaged with this fantastic story. The book’s chapters alternate between three POVs – Rachel Krall, a popular true crime podcaster; Hannah, a woman whose sister died 25 years ago; and the podcast itself. Rachel has traveled to a small town called Neapolis to cover the highly publicized trial of a local hero accused of raping a young teen girl. On the day she arrives, Rachel finds a letter left on her car windshield from a woman who lived in Neapolis when she was growing up. She (Hannah) claims that her older sister was murdered despite the fact that the case was declared an accidental drowning. The chapters from Hannah’s POV are absolutely gut-wrenching. And the chapters that are from the podcast POV are mesmerizing. I could actually hear Rachel’s podcasting voice, that low-pitched, soothing tone that the best podcasters have. While Rachel stays on task covering the current trial, she can’t help but be intrigued by Hannah’s story and starts investigating that as well. By the end, the reader has satisfying resolutions to both crimes.
I can’t say enough positive things about this book. It has it all. I read and loved Goldin’s earlier novel, The Escape Room, and this latest venture is as good or better than that. The writing is tight, and the character development is brilliant. Once I started, I could not put The Night Swim down. I absolutely loved it – 5 stars all the way.
Thanks to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me a digital ARC in return for an honest review. The Night Swim comes out on August 4, 2020. It’s going to be a huge success. Don’t miss it!