Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

by Matthew Sullivan • 2017

When a bookshop patron dies by suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this "shocking, charming, thrilling" (Associated Press) and award-winning debut novel. Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, she leads a meticulously ordered existence among her beloved books, eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs—the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day browsing the overwhelmed stacks. But when a young BookFrog, Joey Molina, hangs himself in one of the upper rooms of the store, Lydia’s life comes unglued. Inside one of Joey’s pockets is a photograph of Lydia as a little girl. And when she flips through some of 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. The more she puzzles over them, the more they seem to contain a hidden message for her about his final days. What did Joey know? And what does it have to do with Lydia? With "oddball characters and [a] layered plot" (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review), Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is “a smart, twisty crime novel set in a world that booklovers will adore” (Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins).