When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this intriguingly dark, twisty ( Kirkus Reviews ) debut novel from an award-winning short story writer.
Both charming and challenging (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review ), Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is a multi-generational tale of abandonment, desperation, and betrayal...inventive and intricately plotted ( Publishers Weekly , starred review)..
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.
Details from that one bloody night begin to circle back.
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.
And they seem to contain a hidden message.
They reveal the psyche of a young man on the verge of an emotional reckoning.
But when Lydia flips through his books she finds them defaced in ways both disturbing and inexplicable.
Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for man.
Always Joey\'s favorite bookseller, Lydia has been bequeathed his meager worldly possessions.
But when Joey Molina, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore\'s upper room, Lydia\'s life comes unglued.
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.
Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight.
When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this intriguingly dark, twisty ( Kirkus Reviews ) debut novel from an award-winning short story writer
