The Swimmer

The Swimmer is Loreth Anne White's 2024 psychological suspense novel about watching, belonging, and how badly an outsider can misread the people she envies.

Chloe Cooper divides her time between dog walking, bartending, and caring for her ailing mother. Socially awkward and mostly unnoticed, she fills the gaps by observing her neighbours and inventing the stories of their lives. Her newest subjects are Jemma Spengler, a polished influencer, and Jemma's husband Adam, a renowned surgeon. Then, early one fog-shrouded morning, Chloe sees a swimmer killed in the water off the beach.

What follows is a twisting account of the investigation and of Chloe's place in it, with a detective and her partner closing in and very little turning out to be what it first appeared. White, an Amazon Charts and Washington Post bestseller, builds the book on unreliable perspective and the pull of a life the narrator wants to be part of.