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by Matthew Sullivan
When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this fiendishly clever debut novel from an award-winning short story writer.
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's upper room, Lydia's life comes unglued. Always Joey's favorite bookseller, Lydia has been bequeathed his meager worldly possessions. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for 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 and will keep you guessing until the very last page.
"Starred Review. Quirky characters and a keen sense of place distinguish this multi-generational tale of abandonment, desperation, and betrayal ... inventive and intricately plotted." - Publishers Weekly
"This quirky debut novel will have particular appeal for puzzle solvers and booklovers." - Booklist
"Though darker than other beloved novels set in bookstores, this story will appeal to fans of Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and Katarina Bivald's The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend. Mystery readers will also appreciate the clever connections between the characters and the crimes." - Library Journal
"An intriguingly dark, twisty story and eccentric characters make this book a standout." - Kirkus
"With Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, Matthew Sullivan has written - with great panache and suspense - a smart, twisty crime novel filled with compelling characters set in a world that book-lovers will adore." - Jess Walter, # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins
"This book ticked all the boxes for me: an engaging heroine, an intriguing premise, interesting characters and a plot that involved books, readers and the very darkest human passions. A fantastic, assured debut." - Elly Griffiths, author of The Crossing Places
"There is a clever, erudite puzzle plot in this bookish mystery, along with whip-smart writing. Matthew Sullivan's debut is stylish and entertaining." - Ellen Crosby, author of The Champagne Conspiracy
"Sullivan's debut is a page-turner featuring a heroine bookseller who solves a cold case with clues from books - what is not to love?" - Nina George, author of The Little French Bistro, and the New York Times bestselling The Little Paris Bookshop
This information about Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matthew Sullivan received his MFA from the University of Idaho and has been a resident writer at Yaddo, Centrum, and the Vermont Studio Center. His short stories have been awarded the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor's Prize for Fiction and have been published in many journals, including The Chattahoochee Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Fugue, Evansville Review, and 580-Split. In addition to working for years at Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver and at Brookline Booksmith in Boston, he currently teaches writing, literature, and film at Big Bend Community College in the high desert of Washington State. The author of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, he is married to a librarian and has two children.
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