Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

I love reading! I love discovering new authors and losing myself in a really good book. Regular readers will know that I’ve been a fan of NetGalley for a while. I’ve read some great books via NetGalley and when I saw the cover for Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore I just knew I wanted to read it.

It landed on my Kindle and I read it in just a few days, I absolutely loved it!

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

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 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.

This was such a great page-turner that I found it really hard to put down. Luckily I had a few trips into the West End so I was able to read it in a few days. There aren’t many characters in this book but I loved the way that they were all linked. I tried to guess what was going to happen as I read but I couldn’t – this is a very clever book. As a fan of book shops I loved the setting and loved the use of books as the plot unfolds.

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is a heart-pounding mystery that perfectly captures the intellect and eccentricity of the bookstore milieu. Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan is published on the 24th August and would make the perfect beach holiday book!