At the start of this outstanding thriller from Goldin (The Escape Room), Rachel Krall, the producer of the popular true crime podcast Guilty or Not Guilty, stops after a long drive at a diner near Neapolis, N.C., where she's planning to cover the high-profile trial of Scott Blair, an Olympic swimming contender accused of raping 16-year-old Kelly Moore. After leaving the diner, Rachel finds a note on her car from a woman named Hannah, who wants her help in proving that Hannah's older sister, Jenny Stiles, then 16, didn't accidently drown 25 years ago, as was ruled, but was murdered. Despite the time-consuming Blair trial, Rachel is intrigued by the cold case. Hannah continues to leave Rachel cryptic notes, but refuses to meet in person. Rachel's suspenseful and insightful investigation into Scott and Kelly's families eventually leads to answers about Jenny's fate. Goldin casts a searing light on small-town politics and how bias can affect the way people view rape victims and their alleged assailants. 150,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Co. (Aug.)

A podcast investigator covering her first present-tense criminal trial is thrown for a loop by a radical new development in a much older case. Now that she has two successful seasons of Guilty or Not Guilty under her belt, Rachel Krall is ready to turn from reopening old cases to following one as it unfolds in real time. Champion swimmer Scott Blair is about to be tried for the rape and sexual battery of Kelly Moore, who attends the high school he graduated from the year before. Prosecutor Mitchell Alkins and rock-star defense attorney Dale Quinn agree that the two teenagers had sex on the night in question, but they don't agree whether it was consensual. So Rachel's come to Neapolis, North Carolina, to attend the trial, prepare daily summaries of every twist and turn, and assure her listeners that every broadcast "puts you in the jury box." As the trial proceeds through an unsparing barrage of she-said, he-said testimony, Rachel finds the objectivity she's promised her listeners increasingly compromised by her growing sympathy for Kelly. A far more serious complication begins even before the trial with a furtive series of notes from Hannah Stills, whose older sister, Jenny, was raped, beaten, and drowned back in 1992. Certain that her sister's assailant, who's never been punished or identified, will be present in the courtroom, Hannah writes that she's finally ready to reopen her own painful past and reveal knowledge about her sister's last night that she's never shared with anyone else. But though Hannah begs for Rachel's help, she fails to show up at every meeting she proposes, leaving Rachel to wonder whether she's really a will-of-the-wisp--and incidentally, what these two assaults a generation apart could possibly have to do with each other. Not as intense as Goldin's blistering debut, The Escape Room (2018), but a remarkably strong contender for second place. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In Cry Baby, the British best-selling, Dagger in the Library short-listed Billingham takes us back to 1996, when his famed DI Tom Thorne was a mere detective sergeant wrestling with the disappearance of a young lad and the subsequent murder of two people linked to him. For No. 1 New York Times best-selling Carcaterra, it's Payback time as former NYPD detective Tank Rizzo joins forces with old partner Pearl to bring down a longtime corrupt cop responsible for getting an innocent man convicted of murder, even as Tank investigates his brother's suspicious death at the behest of his orphaned nephew. In The Wicked Sister, following Dionne's big-news debut, The Marsh King's Daughter, Rachel Cunningham has kept herself locked in a psychiatric facility for 15 years, believing that she caused her parents' death--until new clues about what happened send her out into the world where the real murderer could be waiting. In debuter Garza's When I Was You, bought at auction in a two-book deal, Kelly Medina distracts herself from missing her off-to-college son by obsessing over a young mother in town who shares her name--but then one of the Kellies goes missing (100,000-copy first printing). Goldin, who had a big debut with The Escape Room, returns with The Night Swim, wherein a true-crime podcast host covering a sensational small-town rape trial keeps finding letters addressed to her claiming that a long-ago drowning in town was actually a murder. From Heaberlin, best known for the LibraryReads pick Black-Eyed Susans, We Are All the Same in the Dark features a veteran cop whose efforts to determine the identity of a mysterious, one-eyed little girl found near a highway bring back the terrible night when she lost her leg. In three-time Edgar Award winner Parker's Then She Vanished, PI Roland Ford wonders if he can trust his newest client, up-and-coming politician Dalton Strait, whose wife has evaporated into thin air even as seemingly random bombings are bringing down government buildings in Strait's district. In New York Times best-selling Reich's The Palace, international spy-for-hire Simon Riske becomes a wanted man after trying to help a hotelier friend suddenly accused of blackmail and extortion and tossed into a black-hole Bangkok jail (30,000-copy first printing). Finally, perennial best seller Woods sends stalwart Stone Barrington across some very Choppy Waters in his next case.

The latest from Goldin (The Escape Room, 2019) introduces Rachel Krall, the host of a popular true-crime podcast. Curiosity can be Rachel's kryptonite, but it's also the secret of her success as an investigative reporter. While covering a headline-grabbing trial in a small coastal town in North Carolina--the local golden boy, a champion swimmer, is accused of raping a high-school student--Rachel receives a series of notes begging her to investigate a brutal crime that took place in the town years before. In parallel narratives, Goldin explores both the present-day rape story and the supposedly accidental drowning more than 25 years ago of Jenny Stills. In fact, she was murdered, claims the victim's sister. Rachel finds some startling connections between now and then, and the resolution of both cases will affect the lives of everyone involved. Goldin's prose is inviting, at times electrifying, and always sensitive in dealing with the hot-button issues of date rape and slut shaming. This novel is haunting, yet somehow, after tearing at the reader's heart, it offers a good laugh at the end. Rachel delivers justice for all. Well done.