Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore - Matthew Sullivan

Description

When a bookshop patron commits suicide, it’s his favorite store clerk who must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this fiendishly clever debut novel.

Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, she keeps a meticulously crafted existence among her beloved books, eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs—the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store’s overwhelmed shelves.

But when Joey Molina, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore, Lydia’s life comes unglued. Always Joey’s favorite bookseller, Lydia has inherited his meager worldly possessions. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely man. But when Lydia flips through his books she finds them defaced in ways both disturbing and inexplicable. They reveal the psyche of a young man on the verge of an emotional reckoning. And they seem to contain a hidden message. What did Joey know? And what does it have to do with Lydia?

As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joey’s suicide, she unearths a long-buried memory from her own violent childhood. Details from that one bloody night begin to circle back. Her distant father returns to the fold, along with an obsessive local cop, and the Hammerman, a murderer who came into Lydia’s life long ago and, as she soon discovers, never completely left. Bedazzling, addictive and wildly clever, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is a heart-pounding mystery that perfectly captures the intellect and eccentricity of the bookstore milieu.

Review

From the cover I thought this was going to be a bit of a magical type of book, how wrong I was and how so much better it was too. It's been on my TBR for a while and the thing about just seeing the title is that I had forgotten what the book was going to be about.

The words "Bookstore" had enticed me in yet again but I was not disappointed on what I found inside this book. A really unusual story that was so beautifully told and also so gripping that I read most of the book in one day. I just couldn't put it down.

When Lydia is left a pile of books by a customer at the Bookstore and finds they contain snippets cut from the pages in a random pattern a mystery ensues.  I loved this part of the book the most, so fascinating to follow the clues. The mystery is intriguing what follows begins a trail that leads Lydia to an answer she nor the reader ever expects.

At the heart of the book is a tragedy but the humour and easily readable style means that you don't really ever feel threatened by it, just drawn into the book completely. Great characters vividly drawn means that the book just never gets boring.

I'm giving this book five out of five stars. My thanks to netgalley for an ARC to review.