
COMING APRIL 15, 2025:
A new novel by Matthew Sullivan.

A lake with mysterious properties.
A town haunted by urban legend.
Two women whose lives intersect in terrifying ways.
Welcome to Soap Lake.
Available for PRE-ORDER at your local Indie bookstore, or…
or… use MIDNIGHT Promo Code at Tertulia.com for a 25% discount. Click image to link:
“Midnight in Soap Lake made me fall in love with reading all over again! It’s everything I adore in books: a tangled mystery, rich characters, a terrifying villain, and a strange setting, in which everything harbours a secret. I’ll be handing copies of this one to my friends for years!”
–Stuart Turton, bestselling author of THE LAST MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD and THE 7½ DEATHS OF EVELYN HARDCASTLE
“Midnight in Soap Lake hooked me from page one! This twisty, smart thriller is brimming with complex characters, a page-turning plot and big questions of science, nature, marriage and murder. Matthew Sullivan expertly blends fact, fable and the evocative setting of Soap Lake in rural Washington state to create a spellbinding novel – I adored it!”
–Tara Conklin, NYT bestselling Author of COMMUNITY BOARD and THE LAST ROMANTICS
“Midnight in Soap Lake is a shimmering, shadowy tarn of a mystery, rippling with complex heroines, David Lynchian townspeople, sinister bogeymen (TreeTop is terrifying!), and a spectacularly rich storyline set in smalltown Washington State. Fans of Tana French, Jess Walter, and Kate Atkinson will absolutely love this novel.”
-Sharma Shields, Award-winning Author of THE CASSANDRA and THE SASQUATCH HUNTER’S ALMANAC
“In Matthew Sullivan’s unforgettable novel, Midnight in Soap Lake, those who live on the periphery of American life hold the very secret to its future. Amidst a mysterious mineral lake and puzzling murders, generational survival and hidden truths discovered between friends and family, Sullivan paints a deeply captivating portrait of Soap Lake, a small town teetering between its bright past and a mysterious decline happening in real time. Midnight in Soap Lake is an absolute joy to read. Soap Lake’s enchanting, rebellious characters had my heart from the first page.”
–Michael Zapata, author of THE LOST BOOK OF ADANA MOREAU
“Matthew Sullivan has crafted a brainy thriller that conjures the mischievous humor of Lynch, while imagining conspiracies more unspeakable than Chinatown. His spiderweb of a plot, deeply felt characters, and enchanting love of science will have me dreaming about Soap Lake for a long time. This is my kind of weird.”
–Nova Jacobs, author of THE LAST EQUATION OF ISAAC SEVEREY and THE STARS TURNED INSIDE OUT
“Midnight in Soap Lake is a swirling story for readers who like their dark tales moderated by compassion. Matthew Sullivan has created a town populated by a wild and motley cast—the flawed, the fallen, the damaged and deranged. The still waters of his fictional Soap Lake run deep with historical secrets, scandals and small-town tensions. And as all the colorful threads in this delightful novel converge, the tale heads for a dazzling, bittersweet conclusion.”
–Christopher J. Yates, author of BLACK CHALK and THE RABBIT CLUB

Upcoming Book Events:
- 4/15/25, 7 pm: Midnight in Soap Lake Book Launch with Daryl Gregory! Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Seattle, WA.
- 4/17/25, 7 pm: Powell’s City of Books (Burnside) with Karen Thompson Walker, Portland, OR.
- 4/23/25, 7 pm: Village Books’ Chuckanut Radio Hour with Ted O’Connell, Bellingham, WA.
- 4/25/25, 7 pm: Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, CO.
- 4/28/25 6:30 pm: Boulder Bookstore, Boulder, CO.
- 4/30/25, 7 pm: Anacortes Public Library, w/ Watermark Books. Anacortes, WA.
- 5/2/25, tbd: Centralia College, with Matt Young and Michael Darcher, Centralia, WA.
- 6/8/25, 7 pm (EST): The Back Room, online breakout panel. Free to all!
(more events are in the works!)

About me:
Matthew Sullivan (he/him) 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, 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 raucous 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 at Brookline Booksmith in Boston, he spent 20 years as a tenured instructor teaching writing, literature and film at a rural HSI community college in the high desert of central 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, is forthcoming from Harper Collins/Hanover Square Press.
Midnight in Soap Lake* is a multi-layered mystery set in a wondrous and weird lake town in the rural Pacific Northwest (a fictionalized version of Soap Lake, Washington, where I lived for a number of years).
Midnight in Soap Lake will be Book Two in The Midnight Cycle, a series of stand-alone, thematically-linked novels.
Preorder Midnight in Soap Lake now at Bookshop.org, HarperCollins/Harlequin/Hanover Square Press, or at your local indie bookstore!
More details about Midnight in Soap Lake here.
Book Three of The Midnight Cycle is in the works. It will focus on Detective Harry Moberg (the reclusive detective from Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore) in the months leading up to the Hammerman case. More to come!
Social media links below.
(*formerly titled, Midnight in the Orchard by the Lake)