Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan

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

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, beautiful, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore, Lydia's life comes unhinged. Always Joey's favourite bookseller, Lydia has inherited his meagre 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 pysche 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 untangle 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, 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.

Genres: Mystery - Books About Books - Thriller - Contemporary - Suspense
Condition: Very good
Published: 2017 by William Heinemann
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9781785151439
Weight: 445g