Hi and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Megan Goldin's The Night Swim! Keep reading for a synopsis, review, *and* info about how to grab a copy for yourself. 

[CW: rape, murder, & sexual assault.]

Last week I ventured back into the world of the thriller with Megan Goldin’s The Night Swim. I was immediately hooked by this engrossing & emotion-provoking story that revolves around a violence we’ve unfortunately seen or heard parts of play out all too often before.

Rachel Krall, the host of the Serial-like podcast Guilty or Not Guilty, ventures to Neapolis to cover the trial of alleged rapist Scott Blair & to research & recount the sequence of events the night of the alleged rape of K.

While she’s there, Rachel is contacted by a stranger named Hannah, who begs her to investigate the murder of her sister Jenny at 16. The town says Jenny drowned & 25 years later, in the present-day, she’s still gossiped about & slandered for supposedly being promiscuous. Hannah has part of Jenny’s story to tell—her memories from that long ago summer when she was only 9—& it’s horrifying.

Rachel’s busy with her podcast, with giving her listeners the opportunity to decide if Scott is guilty of having raped K. But she’s caught up in Jenny’s story too, with what really happened to her.

The Night Swim is a powerful, disturbing story of the ongoing sexual violence done toward women & as Rachel expresses to her listeners, the further pain they experience being forced to offer “proof” that violence was done to them.

It’s also about victim-shaming; the narrators reveal how men & women frequently jump on a malicious gossip band-wagon & how it’s not uncommon for communal judgment toward perceived sexual acts &/or assumed lapses in judgment to often be primarily directed toward females.

In terms of the mystery I was genuinely surprised by a big reveal, but I did question Rachel’s reporting methodology on at least a couple of occasions. The fine storytelling held my interest as did the way Goldin plays with genre, using letters & podcast transcripts to further pull the reader in.

While the book & the stories of the girls & women told in it are often dark, there are gestures made toward hope too. But it’s a kind of hope that’s still touched by the reality of being a woman living in the world described above.


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4⭐️. Thanks to St. Martin’s Press & Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own. 

Adriana Herrera is becoming one of my fave contemporary romance authors. Her books sweep me off my feet & the hero of her upcoming release Here to Stay is so heart-grabbing, the heroine so inspiring, that I wanted more than one Epilogue. Or for the Epilogue to be longer. I just wanted more .

Julia del Mar Ortiz is very close to her family but she moved to Dallas from NY so that she could support her boyfriend. & then he broke up with her.

In the time since she’s thrown herself into her rewarding job as Program Director for the philanthropic arm of a major department store. Now she wants to make friends, specifically with other former NYers in her work orbit.

Unfortunately that includes Rocco Quinn, the gorgeous analyst who’s come to assess her company & determine what can be jettisoned before it goes public.

As Julia discovers, Rocco is secretly a big mushy marshmallow. Despite his confidence & sometimes performance of confidence, she notes that he’s also occasionally shy, uncomfortable, etc & in each of those moments my heart is as touched as hers. Rocco’s never had someone take care of him the way that he feels compelled to take care of others (cue the tears ).

And Julia is fantastic. She’s brave, confident, into fashion, & as she reveals to Rocco, passionate about her role in providing safe spaces for children who are undocumented immigrants and/or have parents who are. Throughout the romance Julia has to learn how to negotiate fighting for herself & making a potential compromise for a beloved.

I kinda wanted more specific introspection on the ethicality of them pursuing a relationship when so much is on the line, but otherwise their relationship plays out beautifully. There’s a lot of yearning, a lovely slow burn, & it’s ultimately super sexy.

Add to all of this a nuanced & often loving portrayal of family life (especially Julia’s Dominican mother & Puerto Rican father), humor, & shared bonding over Queens, & Here to Stay gives me nearly everything I could ask for.

Karen Rose is the author of thick, intensely layered, & sexy romantic suspense books, so when Berkley invited me to join a Blog Blitz for her latest release, Say No More, I internally did 🤸🏻‍♀️ 🤸🏻‍♀️.

After being forced to take a short leave from her job with the Louisiana PD Mercy Callahan is returning to California to tell her biological brother Gideon something he should know about their family.

Raised in a cult named Eden where people live off the land, some of the people there are mauled by “wolves” if they go off-land, & girls like Mercy are forced to “marry” at 12, Mercy and Gideon have had trouble re-connecting & dealing with their past trauma (shared & separate) in the outside world 13 years after Mercy’s escape.

But while in the airport Mercy is almost kidnapped by Ephraim, the man she was “married” to at 12. He has his own reasons for wanting to return her to Eden & he’s willing to murder almost anyone to do it.

While I enjoyed SNM & found a lot to appreciate about it, I do want to be clear that this is not a light read. The opening itself—which focuses on Mercy’s escape from Eden as a teen—is very disturbing & violent. There are references made to rape (child & adult, the latter of which happens on the page in the Prologue), lots of murders, & a plot line that revolves around a video of college age Mercy being sexually assaulted after she was drugged.

Plus there are so many other things Ephraim does in this book to try to capture Mercy, and honestly, I started to feel like it was too much for the heroine to have to go through.

And while it’s engaging to see a mystery unfold from multiple perspectives, there are times the disjointed narration momentarily took me out of the story, or when certain characters started to feel like they were taking on too much prominence. (I’m talking about you, Jeffy.)

But as always Rose writes mystery adeptly, moving all these pieces around the board & managing a behemoth of a book like a wizard. The story of the siblings is so emotional & Rose boldly explores their feelings, portraying Mercy’s complicated view of the brother she was told abandoned her & their mother.

For this romance reader, Mercy’s relationship with Detective Rafe Sokolov is satisfying & adds more lightness to a story that gets pretty dark. Their dynamic is sensual but I also didn’t doubt their emotional intimacy.

In the end, this was a 3.5⭐️ for me. It was an enjoyable read that got even better for me the deeper I got into the story & I’m glad to see Mercy get the Happy Ending she deserves.
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